Leander Talbot’s life changed forever when his wife died. He is now reluctantly venturing back into society, knowing that, as the Earl of Ockley, he must marry again to produce an heir. But he can’t bring himself to the sticking point. Instead, he spends his time evading the matchmaking mamas of the ton. The dark and dangerous Duke of Arden is an infamous libertine. It is said that he seduces innocents, and there are even more sinister tales whispered of his predilections. Only the wild young blades who form his retinue know the truth, but he is shunned by all save those wishing to court notoriety. A chance meeting brings Leander into Arden’s orbit. Ignoring the warnings about Arden’s intentions, Leander is drawn into a seductive world of sexual indulgence. There, he finds the freedom he craves from his overbearing family. By the time he suspects Arden might have ulterior motives, it may be too late to save his reputation—and his heart.
There have been thousands of books written about William Shakespeare in the last four hundred years. But very few about his formative years in Stratford – upon – Avon in Warwickshire. His date of birth in 1564 is known from the parish records of The Holy Trinity Church in Stratford as are the births of his daughter Elizabeth in 1583, his twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585 and his burial in 1616. In the Worcester Cathedral Diocese records, there is an entry for a special licence in November 1582 for the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Whatley. This appears to be a mistake as it was amended to Anne Hathaway. It would appear from the inscription on Anne Hathaway's grave in the Holy Trinity Church that she was eight years older than William. Because of the dearth of any further documentation until the first reference to a play by him in London in 1592 the years until this date are referred to by academia as the Lost Years. Besides being a self-employed glover his father was a long-time servant of the town council, eventually becoming High Bailiff; so William would have been entitled to attend the King Edward VI grammar school where he would have been taught Latin and Rhetoric. His father ran into financial difficulties when he was about thirteen years of age when he would have had to leave school. The idea for this book came from reading E.A.J. Honigmann's book Shakespeare; 'The Lost Years' in which he makes a strong case for him spending time in Lancashire as a teacher; and Mark Eccles's book, Shakespeare in Warwickshire which is a mine of detailed information on Shakespeare's contemporaries in Stratford. It was the short step from reading these books, and many more, to imagining his life as a boy: through his teenage years, thinking about girls and wondering about his future. The healthy interest in sex he shows in his plays as an adult would no doubt have been stimulated by encounters in his teenage years. My story ends with his marriage to Anne Hathaway and his eventual escape to London.
Presents a history of the Alaskan oil industry, revealing political corruption, the FBI's investigation, and how these events will influence American politics.
The rediscovery of the Roman cities overwhelmed by the rage of Vesuvius is one of history's most extraordinary adventure stories. Pompeii Awakened revels in that adventure, and tells of the re-emergence of a long-vanished cosmopolis which profoundly inspired a later age - from its arts and architecture to its science, sex and religion. When Herculaneum, Pompeii' s sister in disaster, was located in 1709, that first discovery launched a frenzied scramble for buried treasure. Then in 1755 Pompeii too rose from its crust of volcanic rock, and the science of archaeology was born. Whereas Herculaneum had artistic, political and philosophical impact, the later discoveries at Pompeii spoke rather of domesticity - of cuisine and household architecture, tools, gardens and religion. To this day it is the only site to show what daily life was like in antiquity. However, the full story of Pompeii consists not just in its uniquely preserved classical villas and votives, but in the powerful response it evoked in the European cultural imagination. Here are the English, whose wealth, wet weather and classical education fostered a passion for Naples and its rediscovered cities. We read of Sir William Hamilton discussing priapic cults with his near neighbour, the dilettante Richard Payne Knight, and of how the famous love affair of Emma Hamilton and Admiral Nelson saved the Heculaneum papyri from the French. Here too are the hosts who arrived from across Europe, and then from America - engineers and artists, dreamers and poets, photographers and cinematographers, whose reconstructions and remembrances of Pompeii have never ceased to resonate. Judith Harris brings the doomed city vibrantly to life. Pompeii breathes again through her account of the diverse people who sifted through its remains to catch a glimpse of themselves in the past. From the poetic souls who found a majestic melancholy in Pompeii's shatttered walls , to the tub-thumping Victorian preachers who denounced the city as akin to Sodom and Gomorrah, Pompeii Awakened uncovers many fascinating stories - of sex, science, love and death. The author has spoken to experts on three continents, flown over Pompeii in a hot-air balloon, delved into ancient diaries and descended deep underground to assess the latest discoveries of a lost world . As the sleeping city re-awakens in her hands, Pompeii casts its spell once more, bewitching those who seek to unearth its buried secrets.
