Foundation: The History of England Volume I

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At the start of the sixteenth century, England was a country that was very medieval and often found direction in Rome. Ultimately, it would become a country where not the church but the state was charged with good governance and where women and men began to look for answers in themselves rather than in their rulers. Why do we need another book about the big gun Tudors? You might as well ask why we need another book about Shakespeare for the answer to both questions is the same. Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. The grand sweep has a tendency to define the significant in advance. Many of these histories can explain a sequence of legislation, such as the Factory Acts, but are incapable of really evoking the texture of the times or the tenor of minds. At best, they are a useful framework — I mean, who doesn’t mentally place events of the past against the dates of rulers, thinking of Victorian and Edwardian architects as subtly different in some way? Between 2003 and 2005, he was the author of “Voyages Through Time,” a six title non fiction series that he wrote for young readers. This would be his first ever work meant for younger readers. Most of her works usually have something to do with the complex interaction between space and time and what he loves to call the spirit of place. He usually traces the changing nature of London and explores this through its artists and especially the authors.

The Book of Common Prayer effectively set the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for the future. It would go on to become a critically acclaimed series which was peculiar as such readers are not known for loving history. For his work early on he got a nomination from the Royal Society of Literature. The History of England, v.3 Civil War (also available as Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution) Well I didn’t really give much more thought to the Plantagenets than any other royal family until my cousin Nancy began researching our family history. It seems my ancestor James Ives (1775-1802) convinced (bamboozled) this rather wealthy girl from a well connected family in Boston to marry him. Her name was Anna Ashley (1782-1822). So far research has not brought to light exactly how James was in a position to marry so well. His livelihood is murky, so he must have been charming or attractive or at the very least a smooth talker. The interesting thing about this marriage is that it insured that at least a thimble-full of Plantagenet blood is circulating in my body.

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Easy: This is without a doubt a book written for the masses. It was very well written, easy to follow and not bogged down by descriptions or tangents.

Each of the Tudor monarchs approached religion in different ways. Henry’s son Edward VI ruled only for a few years, but during that time England shifted significantly to the Calvinist position. A new Treason Act was introduced in 1563, passed specifically to protect the religious changes; it was a ‘considered a serious offence question the royal supremacy or to dissent from the articles of faith that the English Church now enjoined’. I enjoy it, I suppose, but I never thought I'd be a novelist. I never wanted to be a novelist. I can't bear fiction. I hate it. It's so untidy. When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet, then I wrote a critical book, and I don't think I even read a novel till I was about 26 or 27. [5] These astonishingly frequent errors clearly undermine the general authority of the book; but even cleaned up, I think it would fail to convince. And Innovation is an odd title to choose when you have so little interest in technology and scientific breakthroughs. The internet, the discovery of antibiotics, nuclear power and many other things with specific English connections are passed over either in silence or with the briefest possible mention.

Publication Order of Shakespeare: the Biography Books

Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award [4] and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was inspired by Iain Sinclair's poem "Lud Heat" (1975), which speculated on a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built. The novel gives Hawksmoor a Satanical motive for the siting of his buildings, and creates a modern namesake, a policeman investigating a series of murders. Chatterton (1987), a similarly layered novel explores plagiarism and forgery and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. London: The Biography is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 1994 he was interviewed about the London Psychogeographical Association in an article for The Observer, in which he remarked: Powerful theologians such as Thomas Cranmer worked on standardised forms of liturgy which were to be used in all churches throughout England. However, it was his bad attitude towards parliament that resulted in the deep divisions that almost tore the country apart during the reign of Charles I, his heir. Review - A little disappointing in places as there were some glaring errors e.g. Thomas Brandon where it should have been Charles Brandon in the index. What? Nevertheless, a good overview of the period, although not very balanced. A large part of the book was given over to Elizabeth I with very little on Edward and Mary, and not much more on Henry VIII. Henry VII isn't even covered in this book on the Tudors but is covered in the previous one in the series, which seems a little odd to me. I wouldn't really recommend it to serious historians, a few too many little errors.

Foundation is a good layman's introduction to English history. It is more of a survey book filled with cool historical minutiae from the origin of names to different cultural traditions to come from this period. It is written in a very easy to read format and is readily accessible to any reader. But this is not an in-depth historical work, but that might increase it's appeal to the average reader. Any issues with the book list you are seeing? Or is there an author or series we don’t have? Let me know! He recounts the foreign wars, the civil strife and warring kings. He also offers a vivid sense of how life was in England from the jokes people told, the houses they built, the food they ate and the clothes they wore. If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of mistrusts and hatreds between Catholic and Protestants in England, this is a good place to start. The Stuart dynasty was responsible for bringing together Scotland and England into one realm even if the union has always been marked by political divisions. Opinionated and shrewd, James proved an eloquent king on diverse issues that included abuse of tobacco, witchcraft and theology.The publishing of this work showed his tendency to creatively reexamine and explore the works of several London based authors. Henry VIII began the process of breaking away from Rome for political and dynastic reasons, not because he was swayed by the new teachings of Luther or Calvin. By the end of his reign, the monasteries were destroyed, much of the church lands and treasure confiscated and the monarch was head of the Church in England. The book is quite startlingly inaccurate on dozens of occasions. George VI became king in 1936, not 1937. The famous 1933 Oxford Union motion about not fighting for king and country is significantly misquoted. How Elgar could be regarded as one of the two most successful British composers in the 1930s escapes me: he wrote nothing of any importance after 1919 and was painfully out of fashion by the time he died in 1934. Mrs Thatcher didn’t ‘form a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’, at Yuri Andropov’s funeral in 1984. She wanted to meet him, but was rebuffed. She first met him on his trip to the UK at the end of the year, three months before he became General Secretary. It wasn’t the ‘leader of East Germany’ who announced the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but an ill-informed Günter Schabowski, by mistake. The novel of Kingsley Amis’s that Thatcher was so dismissive about (‘Huh! Get another crystal ball!’) is not about ‘a communist take-over of Britain’ but a Russian occupation — communism having long been replaced by feudalism. And so on. It is probably not easy to write an account of English history that would satisfy both the layman and the expert and that would cover all the aspects and choose the vantage point every potential reader could wish for, and so all I can say is that if you want to read a history focusing on the monarchy and its representatives and adding vignettes of everyday history in between, this is the right book for you. It would be difficult to find a more informative and entertaining volume. You are drawn into the barbarity of much of English history and entertained by the more whimsical descriptions of life, particularly in the middle ages.