Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2005-08-01
Dewey code: 950.21092
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.28
Review Genghis Khan: And the Making of the Modern World / Three Rivers Press:
Publication date: 2001-08-20
Dewey code: 973.44092
RRP: £25.00
Price: £15.57
Review John Adams / Simon & Schuster Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-07-03
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.19
Review The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King / Vintage:
Creator: Ian McIntosh
Publication date: 1997-03-24
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £22.99
Price: £17.18
Review Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader / Edinburgh University Press:
Publication date: 2008-05-29
RRP: £18.99
Price: £5.86
Review Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches / Headline Review:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2005-05-05
Dewey code: 941
Price: £8.99
Review Henry VIII: King and Court / Pimlico:Henry VIII (1491-1547) casts a long shadow over English royalty and biography alike. In Henry VIII: King and Court, Alison Weir takes on this forbidding reputation to produce an admirably detailed, if somewhat cumbersome, biography of a king who married six times and presided over England's cataclysmic split with Roman Catholicism. Weir's main task is to overturn the "caricature" of Henry "as a man who thought of nothing but chasing the ladies, and who threw chicken bones over his shoulder". This seems a rather obvious characterisation to challenge, but Weir proceeds to amass an extraordinary wealth of detail about Henry's cultivated court, from its learning, architecture and political machinations, to how many people handled Henry's bedsheets and the food that his horses ate. The early sections get bogged down in too much detail, and detract from the political drama of Henry's growing estrangement from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and his fateful marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1532. The second section is much more convincing in tracing how "the young, idealist humanist with liberal ideas about kingship was giving way to a selfish, dogmatic tyrant", as Henry dispenses with Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Anne and then Cromwell, and the court increasingly sinks into factionalism and intrigue. Weir's biography is a lively recreation of the everyday life of Henry, his court and what he called his "ill-conditioned wives", but it neglects the wider European dimensions of Henry's reign, and sweeps over many crucial aspects of the split with Rome. Detailed and scholarly, Henry VIII: King and Court provides a strangely colourless portrait of the most colourful of English monarchs. -Jerry Brotton.
Publication date: 2008-09-18
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.98
Review Down in the Drink: Their Deadliest Enemy Was the Sea / Headline Review:
Creator: Susan Massotty
Edition: Definitive ed
Publication date: 1997-03-27
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £7.99
Price: £9.36
Review The Diary of a Young Girl / Penguin Books Ltd:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2005-04-04
Dewey code: 324
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.14
Review Blair / Free Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1982-01-28
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £6.99
Price: £2.05
Review Liverpool Miss / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-02-03
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.22
Review Wellington: The Iron Duke / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:We associate Wellington so much with the battle of Waterloo that it's easy to forget that, before the battle, he had had a long military career already and that, after it, he had an even longer career as politician, prime minister and pillar of the establishment. Richard Holmes's admirably clear and succinct biography of the Duke has a chapter on his youth as a slightly awkward loner from the Anglo-Irish nobility and a concluding chapter which races swiftly through the 37 years of his post-Waterloo life. However the bulk of the book, unsurprisingly, is given over to a description and analysis of his military exploits. As viewers of his TV series and readers of his previous books will know, Holmes is a brilliant interpreter of battlefields and what took place on them. He has visited most of the sites of Wellington's battles, not only those in Europe but those in India where the young Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, gained his first experiences as a general. (Wellington himself, in later life, claimed that his finest military achievement was not Waterloo but the winning of the Battle of Assaye during the Maratha Wars in 1803. ) He uses his knowledge of the battle sites and his familiarity with all the extensive literature on the Peninsular War and Waterloo to produce a vivid account of Wellington's string of successes as a general. As the quotes in this book from his writings and despatches show, Wellington had a gift for the striking phrase and for concise description of complicated events. It's a gift his biographer shares and Holmes has produced a very readable and enjoyable book. -Nick Rennison.
Edition: New title
Publication date: 2004-09
Dewey code: 952.025092
RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.54
Review The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi / Kodansha International Ltd:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-10-08
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £7.99
Price: £0.79
Review Strange Places, Questionable People / Pan Books:John Simpson has had an extraordinary professional life: he has been to 101 countries, interviewed 120 rulers of various persuasions, and witnessed 29 wars and uprisings. He had an ill-fated spell reading the Nine O'Clock News, and was also the BBC political correspondent (which he loathed). He emerges fairly unscathed; he can appear arrogant and over-bearing, but he maintains a healthy degree of self-deprecation, and to survive the macho world in which he works one would need the skin of a rhinoceros. He has become a household name (though he still gets mistaken for presenter John Humphrys), and his stories, some oft-repeated, are fascinating, the tone as dry as his reportage. The disquieting effect they have is to show the fragile arbitrariness of power and the people who crave it, and it is this indigestible feeling of vulnerability that one is left with when the gung-ho spirit has faded. But what of the man? Curiously he chose to live with his father when his parents' marriage split up. He loves books, as he constantly reminds us, and would love to be known for his writing. He is sensitive about his appearance, referring more than once to his girth, and he is now married for the second time. Beyond this, he reveals little extraneous detail. This is a pity, but should be no surprise. [+]The story is the thing, after all, and his is a journalistic honesty, which makes for compelling, if two-dimensional, reading. -David Vincent.
Edition: 3rd Revised edition
Publication date: 2001-11-01
Dewey code: 791.43028092273
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.53
Review The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of Over 125 American Movie and TV Idols - From Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow to James ... Monroe to River Phoenix and Phil Hartman / McGraw-Hill Contemporary:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2006-07-06
RRP: £8.99
Price: £0.01
Review Two Lives / Abacus:
Publication date: 2006-04-03
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.26
Review The Knife Man: Blood, Body-snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery / Bantam Books:
Creator: Victor Neuburg
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 1985-08-29
Dewey code: 305.56909421
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.61
Review London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) / Penguin Classics:
Authors
- Annette Dumbach
- Jud Newborn
Publication date: 2007-04-12
Dewey code: 943
RRP: £7.99
Price: £4.04
Review Sophie Scholl and the White Rose / Oneworld Publications:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2004-10-14
Dewey code: 355
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.09
Review Soldier Five: The Real Truth About the Bravo Two Zero Mission: The Real Truth About the Bravo Two Zero Mission / Mainstream Publishing:
Publication date: 2008-04-01
Dewey code: 200
RRP: £12.99
Price: £9.99
Review The Vatican Pimpernel: The Wartime Exploits of Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty / The Collins Press:
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Models & Brands:
Genghis Khan: And the Making of the Modern World, John Adams, The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King, Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader, Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches, Henry VIII: King and Court, Down in the Drink: Their Deadliest Enemy Was the Sea, The Diary of a Young Girl, Blair, Liverpool Miss, Wellington: The Iron Duke, The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi, Strange Places, Questionable People, The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of Over 125 American Movie and TV Idols - From Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow to James ... Monroe to River Phoenix and Phil Hartman, Two Lives, The Knife Man: Blood, Body-snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery, London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics), Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, Soldier Five: The Real Truth About the Bravo Two Zero Mission: The Real Truth About the Bravo Two Zero Mission, The Vatican Pimpernel: The Wartime Exploits of Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty |
