Book Review: King John and the Road to Magna Carta
/800 years ago, King John "Lackland" sealed Magna Carta and unwittingly laid the foundation for some of Western law; a new book takes a fresh look at this much-maligned figure
Read More800 years ago, King John "Lackland" sealed Magna Carta and unwittingly laid the foundation for some of Western law; a new book takes a fresh look at this much-maligned figure
Read MoreHe established Parliament, hammered the Scots, expelled the Jews, and inspired centuries of biographers - England's King Edward I gets a lively new biography
Read MoreUnder the direction of Oliver Cromwell, dozens of men deliberated to execute the captive King Charles I, and when Charles II came to power a decade later, those men were suddenly in the gravest danger. A fascinating new book tells their stories.
Read MoreVeteran popularizer Peter Ackroyd gives his readers a rattling good yarn of kings, decapitations, interregnums, frivolities, and depositions
Read MoreThe protracted dynastic struggle of York and Lancaster is the dramatic subject of the new book by historian Dan Jones
Read MoreThe discovery of Richard III's skeleton in 2012 has flushed a number of books about the legendary dark monarch back into print - and none more welcome than this snappy volume by veteran biographer Desmond Seward
Read MoreFor hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived and thrived and worshipped in what is now the British Isles, raising massive monuments and scorching the very ground in the long ages before the arrival of Christianity; a magisterial new history recounts as much as we now know about those lost centuries
Read MoreEngland's 'bluff king Hal' is put under the microscope in a scathing new biography
Read MoreOur reigning master of vigorous popular history takes on the most vigorous, popular English dynasty of them all
Read MoreAn exhaustive - and immensely enjoyable - line-by-line examination of Shakespeare's final play
Read More"Houses, Churches, mix'd together - Streets, unpleasant in all Weather" - so wrote the poet about resolute, dissolute London, whose 18th century excesses are the subject of a grand new book
Read MoreThe official biographer of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother now gives us that most unlikely of things: a collection of her life-long correspondence
Read MoreThe words of Shakespeare have become a common literary language - but whose words did HE know? Why, the words of Thomas Cranmer, of course.
Read MoreElizabeth I's radical decision to remain unmarried gave hope to every aspiring suitor in the Western world - a new reprint marches us quickly through the usual suspects.
Read MoreFor thirty hard-fought years, the King of England was also the King of France - new in US bookstores is a thrilling account of those years
Read MoreA big new biography of Edward Burne-Jones, whose vivid and dreamlike artwork caught the sentimentality of his time and shaped it to immortal perfection.
Read MoreA masterful new biography takes Henry VIII down a peg or two
Read MoreThey were for King, country, and courtesans - not necessarily in that order! They were the Cavaliers, and a spirited new book tells their story.
Read MoreA quietly stunning new biography of England's infamous "Bloody Mary"
Read MoreAn immensely enjoyable new book looks at four women who ruled England in the centuries before Queen Elizabeth I.
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