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£12.99
Discover a story 400 years in the making – the definitive biography of the man who dominated England in the first half of the 16th century. Born into the English Wars of the Roses, educated in the European Renaissance, enthralled by the Age of Exploration and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More is one of the most famous – or notorious – figures in English history. Is he a saintly scholar, the visionary author of ‘Utopia’ and an inspiration for statesmen, socialists and intellectuals even today? Or is he the stubborn zealot famously portrayed in Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’?
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£18.99
The brilliant and sometimes scandalous lives of twenty-one women who made French history.
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£14.99
Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the 15th century, the Medici gained political power in Florence, raising the city to a peak of cultural achievement and becoming its hereditary dukes. Among their number were no fewer than three popes and a powerful and influential queen of France. Their patronage brought about an explosion of Florentine art and architecture. Michelangelo, Donatello, Fra Angelico and Leonardo are among the artists with whom they were associated. Thus runs the ‘received view’ of the Medici. Mary Hollingsworth argues that the idea that they were wise rulers and enlightened fathers of the Renaissance is a fiction that has acquired the status of historical fact. In truth, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the Borgias – tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own and which they beggared in their lust for power.