Showing all 3 resultsSorted by latest
From the bestselling team behind Horrible Histories! It's time to delve into the totally true (sort of) and incredibly intriguing pages of William the Conqueror's Secret Diary. Horrible Histories' Secret Diaries of the most extraordinary (and Horrible) characters of all time will blow your mind.
On 5 January 1066, Edward the Confessor’s death plunged the nation into a succession crisis that would indelibly change England forever. Mere hours after Edward’s remains had been laid to rest, his brother-in-law Harold II seized power, inciting the wrath of two formidable challengers: King Haraldr of Norway and Edward’s ambitious cousin, William, Duke of Normandy. In this startling new history, Dr Erin Goeres unveils the intense drama that unfolded over the tumultuous nineteen days between the Battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings in the Autumn of 1066, and which led to the deaths of two monarchs, ending a centuries-long Anglo-Scandinavian rule. Drawing on sources from England, Normandy and Scandinavia, Goeres uncovers complex histories, characters, and motivations.
At or about 1.15 in the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was struck by a 22-gramme, 15-millimetre French musket round fired down from the mizzen top of the Redoutable, a distance of some 70 feet to HMS Victory’s quarter deck. It nicked the edge of his epaulette, and passed diagonally down, through the material of his coat and into the left shoulder, fracturing the upper part of the scapula or shoulder blade, then the second and third rib. It pierced the left lung, dividing a branch of the pulmonary artery, and emerged to sever the spine, splintering the sixth and seventh vertebrae above and below as it crashed between. The soft lead ball – distorted by collisions with bone – ended its flight embedded in muscle two inches below the right scapula. In this fresh and visceral retelling of the battle of Trafalgar, Paul O’Keeffe traces the course of events both prior and subsequent to that fatal shot.