A Very Ordinary Person
/When his brother the king abdicated, shy Prince Bertie suddenly became king - and he was just settling in when the World War II threw his kingdom into chaos. 'A Year with the Windsors' continues.
Read MoreEdward the Last
/When he was Prince of Wales, he was the nation's darling, but when Edward VIII came to the throne, he became the greatest threat the monarchy had ever faced.
Read MoreThat Indescribable Something
/She was married to two kings, reigned during the advent of trench warfare and the suppression of suffragettes, and stayed all her life a delightful dinner guest; A Year With the Windsors continues with the fascinating and fastidious Queen Mary.
Read MorePrince Eddy and the Blackguards
/When the heir presumptive, Prince Eddy, died suddenly, the nation and empire was convulsed with mourning - and a century of speculation began! Had the lost prince been a simpleton, a saint, a catamite - even Jack the Ripper?
Read MoreWife Number Five
/Teenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family's ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own - risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl's brief rise and fall.
Read More“My Job Is to Be King"
/When the long reign of Victoria ended, her son took the throne with a bonhomie the country hadn't seen in a century. The new king ate and entertained prodigiously - and mediated prodigiously as "the uncle of Europe." A Year with the Windsors looks at Edward VII.
Read MoreHistory Without the Moon
/Her reign was epic in length and social impact, but it very nearly didn't happen at all. She ruled through two generations of her people, and she left the British monarchy very different from how she found it. She is Queen Victoria, and our Year with the Windsors starts as it must: with her.
Read MoreThe Light in Their Eyes
/Thomas Lawrence was the rising young star painter of the politicians, soldiers, rakes, and mistresses of Regency London, but his work had a life and intelligence that transcended the trendy. A new book looks at a forgotten master.
Read MoreWashingon: A Life by Ron Chernow
/For two centuries, he's been the founding myth of his nation: first in war, first in peace, Washington the paragon. Ron Chernow's new biography does nothing to tarnish that image -- but should it?
Read MoreBeyond the Pillars of Hercules
/In addition to their gods and goddesses, the ancient Greeks worshiped youth and athletic prowess, and their foremost bard was Pindar.
Read MoreAn Anvil Unto Sorrow
/What we know about Edward II came from the brilliant mind of Christopher Marlowe. A new biography seeks to separate the real man from the dramatist’s fertile imagination.
Read MoreKeeping Up With The Tudors: Bernard’s Theorem
/At her trial, Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery, witchcraft, and incest - charges long mocked by historians. But a new book asks: is it possible Anne was actually guilty?
Read MoreOn the Bunny Slopes of Helicon
/Steven Moore's big new book seeks to give an 'alternative history' to that most familiar of literary forms, the novel. But at what point does history become wishful thinking?
Read MoreThe Nautilus
/When John Ruskin, the foremost architectural critic of the Victorian era, discovered Venice, he fell in love. An elaborate new work paints the picture in great detail.
Read MoreThe Glorious Revolution of 1688 was peaceful, orderly, and above all sensible, or so says towering Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Two new books look at the man and the Revolution he so indelibly described.
Read MoreThe Why of the Beholder
/Can Fantagraphics' Spectrum series of contemporary fantasy art yield the same sort of enjoyment as a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Steve Donoghue looks into the newest collection.
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