Raised in London, the son of a school master, Thomas More became a great scholar, Oxford graduate and lawyer. He served King Henry VIII becoming one of his trusted advisors. Sir Thomas refused to acknowledge Henry VII as the head of the Church in England and was arrested for high treason. He was beheaded and became a Martyr for the Church. [adapted from back cover.
Once upon a time, Pinocchio was a real boy who couldn't tell a lie. Now he's a politician who can't seem to tell the truth. As a junior analyst with a powerful lobby firm, nobody was more anonymous than Pinocchio. But when a chance encounter leads to his being labeled, "The Last Honest Man in Washington," Pinocchio becomes the toast of the town - and an unwitting pawn in a corrupt congressman's political game. With his new career taking a toll on his marriage - and his relationship with his aging father - Pinocchio finally tells a lie so outrageous that he reverses the magic that once made him a "real man," and he transforms back into a wooden puppet - live on C-SPAN. Now he has just one week to undo the spell, or he will end his days as a worthless splinter of wood, but to do that, he's going to need the help of a drunken fairy and a family of talking insects... Part satire, part thriller, Splintered is a genre-shattering look at American politics that takes readers on a whimsical journey from the halls of Congress to the beaches of the Caribbean, and on to an amazing dreamland where anything is possible.
Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632) was a prolific playwright and pamphleteer chiefly remembered for his vivid and witty portrayals of everyday London life. This book uses Dekker’s prose pamphlets (published between 1613 and 1628) as a way in to a crucial and relatively neglected period of the history of pamphleteering. Under James I, after the aggressive Elizabethan exploitation of the new media, pamphleteers carved out a discursive space in which claims about truth and authority could be deconstructed. Avoiding the dangerous polemic employed by the Marprelate pamphleteers, they utilised playful, deliberately ambiguous language that drew readers’ attention to their own literary devices and games. Dekker shows pamphlets to be unstable and roguish, and the nakedly commercial imperatives of the book trade to be central to the world of Jacobean cheap print, as he introduces us to a world in which overlapping and competing discourses jostled for position in London’s streets, markets and pulpits. Contributing to the history of print and to the history of Jacobean London, this book also provides an appraisal of the often misunderstood prose works of an author who deserves more attention, especially from historians, than he has so far received. Critics are slowly becoming aware that Dekker was not the straightforward, simple hack writer of so many accounts; his works are complex and richly reward study in their own right as well as in the context of his more famous predecessors and contemporaries. As such this book will further contribute to a post-revisionist historiography of political consciousness and print cultures under the early Stuarts, as well as illuminate the career of a neglected writer.
Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
This biography of English goldsmith Thomas Violet uses his dramatic life to explore banking, spying, the English Civil War, economic theories, the silver trade, and anti-Semitism in early modern England. By putting a human face on political, social, and economic change, the book provides a vivid view of the seventeenth century's seismic changes.
