England Biography

Warrior and writer, genius and crank, rider in the British cavalry’s last great charge and inventor of the tank - Winston Churchill led Britain to fight alone against Nazi Germany in the fateful year of 1940 and set the standard for leading a democracy at war. Like no other portrait of its famous subject, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is a dazzling display of facts more improbable than fiction, and an investigation of the contradictions and complexities that haunt biography.

From the author of The Sisters, a chronicle of the most brutal, turbulent, and exuberant period of England's history. Bess Hardwick, the fifth daughter of an impoverished Derbyshire nobleman, did not have an auspicious start in life. Widowed at sixteen, she nonetheless outlived four monarchs, married three more times, built the great house at Chatsworth, and died one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in English history.

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature.

England, late 1547. King Henry VIII is dead. His 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth is living with the king's widow, Catherine Parr, and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. Seymour is the brother of Henry VIII's third wife, the late Jane Seymour, who was the mother to the now-ailing boy king. Ambitious and dangerous, Seymour begins an overt flirtation with Elizabeth that ends with Catherine sending her away. When Catherine dies a year later and Seymour is arrested for treason soon after, a scandal explodes.

Guy Burgess was the most important, complex, and fascinating of "The Cambridge Spies" - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.

In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: among them, Diana's sexually charged mother, bad-girl sister-in-law Fergie, and, most formidable of them all, her mother-in-law, the Queen. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix, and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.

The King in Love is an all-embracing account of the loves of that celebrated royal womanizer, Edward VII - as prince of Wales and as king. It is also a study of the three women with whom the king was most deeply in love - his "official" mistresses, Lillie Langtry, Daisy Warwick, and Alice Keppel.

Who lived to regret her "deathbed" confession? Was Amelia Dyer mad or wicked? Why did the judiciary look compassionately on women who committed infanticide? Among over 80 women whose stories appear in this book, some were tragic; some were evil; some were mad; and several were undoubtedly innocent of the murders for which they were hanged.

Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.

Russell Kirk has ingeniously combined into a living whole the private Burke and the public Burke. He gives us a fresh assessment of Burke, a statesman enjoying even greater influence today than in his own time. He lucidly unfolds Burke's philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations in the 18th century and how Burke, through his philosophy, "speaks to our age".

In a world where many kings, queens, and princes lacked nothing but true love, marital mismatches could bring out the baddest, boldest behavior in the bluest of bloodlines. Brimming with outrageous real-life stories of royal marriages gone wrong, this is an entertaining, unforgettable book of dubious matches doomed from the start.

The death of Princess Diana, Princess of Wales, sent shockwaves around the world. A nation was left in mourning, but soon feelings of suspicion surfaced: was her death all that the Establishment might wish us to believe? Now, after an exhaustive two-year probe, investigative writer and former journalist Noel Botham has dared to reveal what the people of Britain have always believed - that Diana's death was murder.

The British monarchy is at a turning point. Concise and engaging, this book charts the very beginnings of British reign through to the longest serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II—and looks forward to the reign of King Charles III. Much more than a linear history, this is the intertwined story of royalty and state, of divisions, invasions, rivalries, death and glory; the story of nation fates tied with the personal endeavours of monarchs through the ages. This book is a necessary and comprehensive guide to the British Monarchy and how it has shaped history—and our lives today.

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.

Reine d'Écosse six jours après sa naissance en 1542, mariée à François II et reine de France à dix-sept ans, veuve un an après, remariée à lord Darnley, amante du comte de Bothwell qui tuera Darnley, réfugiée auprès d'Elisabeth Ire qui la gardera captive pendant vingt ans, décapitée en 1587 pour s'être laissé prendre au piège d'une conspiration : Marie Stuart est l'une des figures les plus romanesques, les plus tragiques de l'histoire.

...And What Do You Do? is a hard-hitting analysis of the royal family, exposing its extravagant use of public money and the highly dubious behaviour of some among its ranks, whilst being critical of the knee-jerk sycophancy shown by the press and politicians. Baker also considers the wider role the royals play in society, including the link with House of Lords reform, and the constitutional position of the monarch, which is important given Prince Charles’ present and intended approach.

Starring Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II and John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, Netflix's original series The Crown, created by Peter Morgan and growing out of his Oscar-winning movie The Queen starring Helen Mirren, paints a unique and intimate portrait of Britain's longest-reigning monarch. This official companion to the show's first season is an in-depth exploration of the early years of Elizabeth II's time as queen, complete with extensive research and additional material.

Vicky, Alice, Helena, and Beatrice were historically unique sisters, born to a sovereign who ruled over a quarter of the earth's people and who gave her name to an era: Queen Victoria. Two of these princesses would themselves produce children of immense consequence. All five would curiously come to share many of the social restrictions and familial machinations borne by 19th-century women of less-exulted class.

Eugene England (1933–2001) — one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals in modern Mormonism — lived in the crossfire between religious tradition and reform. This first serious biography, by leading historian Terryl L. Givens, shimmers with the personal tensions felt deeply by England during the turmoil of the late 20th century.

This dramatic account of the War of 1812 fills a surprising gap in the popular literature of the nation's formative years. It is this war, followed closely on the War of Independence, that established the young nation as a permanent power and proved its claim to Manifest Destiny.