Like its acclaimed predecessors, RESTORATION LONDON and DR JOHNSON'S LONDON, this book is the result of the author’s passionate interest in the practical details of everyday life – and the conditions in which most people lived - so often ignored in conventional history books. The book begins with the River Thames, which - from its surly water-men to its great occasions - played such a central part in the city's life. It moves on to the streets, houses and gardens; cooking, housework and shopping; clothes, jewellery and make-up; health and medicine; sex and food; education, etiquette and hobbies; religion, law and crime.

Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London

History

PICARD, LIZA

Europe

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003

Arthur the King : A Romance

In Allan Massie's novel of King Arthur he cleverly uses the key points of the legend - Arthur, Merlin, his lover Morgan le Fay, his wife Guinevere, the various knights, the sword excalibur, the round table. He opens with the sword excalibur in the stone. Knight after knight, even the King of the Orkneys fails. Then comes Arthur, young and callow. He succeeds. He is the new king. You need to be well versed in the Arthurian legends to know where Massie has pillaged existing stories rather than invented his own twists to the tale. The Camelot of the novel is, incidentally, on the River Tweed. We learn a little of the origins of the magician Merlin (he was the son of a Roman centurion), how he nurtures the child Arthur, but Massie's Merlin becomes a dirty old man. Arthur's great friend and servant is Cal. Together they are involved in many a scrap. The novel is about the complete life of Arthur, how he welds the nation together, but gets involved in European wars. How the nation fragments when he isn't around to keep it in order. Massie also includes the Holy Grail in this enthralling historical novel. We may think we know the Arthurian story, but in Massie's hands it comes across freshly minted.

Arthur the King

Literature & Fiction

MASSIE, ALLAN

Mythology & Folk Tales

The spread of devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux is one of the impressive religious manifestations of our time. During her few years on earth this young French Carmelite was scarcely to be distinguished from many another devoted nun, but her death brought an almost immediate awareness of her unique gifts. Through her letters, and especially through the publication of "The Little Flower" she soon came to mean a great deal to numberless people. Within twenty-eight years after death, this simple young nun had been canonized; and in 1944, the pope declared her the secondary patroness of France. Born to a devout Catholic bourgeois family, Therese and her four surviving sisters all became nuns. Therese had long assumed she would die young and looked forward to it as her reunion with God and her lost loved ones. When her health began to fail in 1894 (she was 20 years old and the tuberculosis that was diagnosed would end her life aged 24) she suffered her first pulmonary haemorrage on a Good Friday and rejoiced in the fact that God had announced her imminent death to her on the anniversary of his own crucifixion. Her sainthood and the continuing attraction of her life and belief stems from self-sacrifice.

Saint Therese of Lisieux

Biographies & Memoirs

HARRISON, KATHRYN

Community & Culture

With his trademark range and independence of thought, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto sweeps aside the tidy separation between the enlightened first world' United States and Canada, and less privileged Latin America. He shows us why it is impossible to understand the history of North, Central and South America in isolation. From the emergence of the first human civilisations through the arrival of Europeans and up to today, the land mass has been bound together in a complex web of inter-relationships - from migration and trade to religion, slavery, warfare, culture, food and the spread of political ideas. For most of human history, it was the South that dominated the North - and, as he argues in his provocative conclusion, it might well again.

The Americas: The History of a Hemisphere

Fernandez, Armesto Felipe

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Books by London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003