Author: Roy Douglas
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: party, liberal, history, liberals
Number of Pages: 384
Published: 2005-06-11
List price: $55.00
ISBN-10: 1852853530
ISBN-13: 9781852853532

The Liberal Party, the party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George, was a dominant force in Britain, and the world, at the height of the power of the British Empire. It emerged in mid-Victorian Britain from a combination of Whigs and Peelite Tories. Split by Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, it nevertheless returned to power in Edwardian England and held it until after the outbreak the First World War. Riddled by internal divisions and with its traditional ground increasingly occupied by Labour, the party lost ground in Parliament, becoming little more than a token for many years. With the

Author: Vanessa McMahon
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: england, shakespeare, murder
Number of Pages: 285
Published: 2006-11-15
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 1852855363
ISBN-13: 9781852855369

Fascination with murder is not a modern phenomenon. People in the past were just as interested in extreme violence and homicide as people nowadays. In seventeenth-century England all excessive and gratuitous violence was condemned and prosecuted, with murderers being categorized as particularly wicked. The courtrooms where murderers were tried were packed and crowds attended their execution. Ballads about notorious cases and prints reflected the huge interest such cases generated. Yet, in a world with no police and little forensic expertise, identification, pursuit and prosecution presented ma

Author: Veronica Ortenberg
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: grail, holy, search
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 2006-02-20
List price: $39.95
ISBN-10: 1852853832
ISBN-13: 9781852853839

This book surveys the influence of the middle ages, and of medieval attitudes and values, on later periods and on the modern world. Many artistic, political and literary movements have drawn inspiration and sought their roots in the thousand years between 500 and 1500 AD. Medieval Christianity, and its rich legacy, has been the essential background to European culture as a whole.Gothic architecture and chivalry were two keys to Romanticism, while nationalists, including the Nazis, looked back to the middle ages to find emerging signs of national character. In literature few myths have been as

Author: Alastair Duke
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: countries, low, revolt, reformation
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 2003-12-19
List price: $35.95
ISBN-10: 1852853980
ISBN-13: 9781852853983

The Revolt of the Netherlands has long been familiar to English-speaking readers, but the Reformation there has remained largely uncovered. This book explores how the Reformation in the Low Countries developed along very different lines from German Lutheranism. Conflicting interests and beliefs, as well as the war and political struggle, shaped the final religious outcome.

Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: century, england, eighteenth, culture, taste, subject
Number of Pages: 272
Published: 2007-02
List price: $26.95
ISBN-10: 1852855347
ISBN-13: 9781852855345

In the eighteenth century, England became the richest and most powerful country in the world. This is a rounded portrait of English culture in the eighteenth century. Not only a matter of leading writers, from Swift and Pope to Dr. Johnson and Sheridan, and of artists from Hogarth to Reynolds, there was also room for popular ballads, political doggerel, pornographic verse and vigorous satirical cartoons. Taste in architecture ranged from great houses with gardens landscaped by Capability Brown to the changed use of domestic space in towns. Jeremy Black looks at both the wealth of cultural acti

Author: Irene Collins
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: daughter, parson, austen, jane
Number of Pages: 282
Published: 2003-08-02
List price: $45.95
ISBN-10: 1852851724
ISBN-13: 9781852851729

Jane Austen was a clergyman’s daughter, related to other clergy, born and brought up in a parsonage. Many of her attitudes, expressed in her novels, reflect this directly or indirectly. Her father’s reasoned and practical approach to religion, along with the range of books available to her in his library, shaped the essentially moral outlook behind her entertaining, but devastating, criticism of individuals and of society.Her attitude to the gentry is subtly ambivalent. Accepted as a clergyman’s daughter in local society, Jane Austen sometimes mirrors their prejudices, seen f

Author: Emma Mason
Publisher: Hambledon & London
Keywords: dynasty, history, godwine, house
Number of Pages: 304
Published: 2004-03-04
List price: $50.00
ISBN-10: 1852853891
ISBN-13: 9781852853891

Harold Godwineson was king of England from January 1066 until his death at Hastings in October of that year. For much of the reign of Edward the Confessor, who was married to Harold’s sister Eadgyth, the Godwine family, led by Earl Godwine, had dominated English politics. In The Rise and Fall of the House of Godwine, Emma Mason tells the turbulent story of a remarkable family which, until Harold’s unexpected defeat, looked far more likely than the dukes of Normandy to provide the long-term rulers of England. But for the Norman Conquest, an Anglo-Saxon England ruled by the Godwine dynasty w