WILLIAM CAXTON’S ORIGINAL WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS FROM1483,THE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 1532 AND EXTRACTS FROM THE CHAUCER TEXT OF 1561. COMPILED, ANNOTATED AND WITH MODERN VERSIONS OF THE CHAUCER TEXTS Meet the most famous characters of the English Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales. All the original woodcuts depicting them from the 1400s and 1500s […]
A magical mystery tour of the ancient world by the Roman author Solinus, – the Michael Palin of antiquity.
The first modern English language translation, with introduction and notes.
Solinus takes the reader on a tour of the known world of his time (early third century AD) and on the way we meet unicorns, men ‘transformed into wolves’, deer which swallow snakes after ‘dragging them out of their lairs’ by the force of their breath, serpents with four horns, hyaenas which ‘imitate the sound of people vomiting’, men without noses and faces which are entirely flat, and with no mouths so that they eat through ‘small holes by way of oaten stalks’.
There are also cannibals and ‘the Pamphagi, who eat everything which is chewable, and anything which happens to be born’. In Phrygia there is an animal called the bonacus: ‘When it turns to flee, it discharges dung with a quick evacuation of its stomach, for a length of three acres. The heat of the dung burns whatever it touches. Thus it wards off pursuers with its noxious secretion.’
In the midst of all this menagerie of strange people and stranger creatures, we are treated to careful descriptions of all the foreign lands and learn titbits such as this: ‘India gives pearls; so do the shores of Britannia. The divine Julius [Caesar] wished it to be understood by an adjacent description that the breastplate he dedicated in the temple of his ancestress Venus was made from British pearls.’
Solinus also gives travel tips: ‘Those seeking India set sail in midsummer; either before the beginning of the Dog Days [end of July] or immediately after, and those returning sail back in the month of December. And he describes foreign peoples: ‘The Seres [the Chinese] are gentle and very peaceful among themselves. They otherwise shun the society of the rest of mankind, to such a degree that they reject the trade of other nations.’
Solinus is bound to thrill, amuse, horrify and educate you. Just close your eyes when he talks about the snakes everywhere. And try to be multi-cultural when he says: ‘The Garamantic Aethiopians [from present-day Libya] do not have private marriage, but permit everyone to have sexual relations in common. Thence it is that only mothers recognise their sons.’
The author attended the Ivy League Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, during the years 1922-1924. During that time he got free lodging in the house of Professor David Lambuth, Head of the English Department, in return for acting as a butler and making himself useful about the house. This brought him into close daily […]
“A captivating prose-poem about longing and identity – and the search for one’s place in the world.” -Richard Zimler This is the first appearance in English of a work by Portugal’s most innovative contemporary author, who has evolved his own concept of what a book can be. In this work, which resembles a long prose […]
Red-Headed Woman was a sensational best-seller, and it is believed that during the height of the Great Depression, the author earned more than a million dollars in royalties from it. It was made into the film Red-Headed Woman (1932) with Jean Harlow playing the role of the anti-heroine Lillian Andrews, who in the book is […]
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Orpheus was the legendary singer and lute-player, taught by the Greek god Apollo himself, who could enchant everyone who listened to him. Birds and animals would gather round him to listen to the beauty of his music. Orpheus’s mother was Calliope, the chief Muse of Greek Mythology, who also presided over Greek epics, which originally […]
This important work appears here in English for the first time in nearly a century, it is one of the most moving testaments we have from a writer in prison.
Where does reality end and ‘bent reality’ begin? This collection of 55 eerie and bizarre stories set in various countries and in various times is the first book of fiction published by Robert Temple, who is well known for his unusual non-fiction books such as The Sirius Mystery and A New Science of Heaven. One […]
Drawn largely from primary sources, more than 2000 of them discovered by the author in 53 separate archives, the true story behind the trial and execution of King Charles I emerges in greater detail than ever before. The central question is: who were the men who tried the King and signed his Death Warrant, who are known as the ‘regicides’? For the first time it is possible to know who they really were, what were their backgrounds, their families, their early careers, their political and religious beliefs, and above all, their extensive relationships with one another. Eleven of them were barristers, one was a judge, some were colonels of army regiments, most were MPs. The majority of them could call one another ‘cousin’.
In a sense, this was a family affair, an intensely traditional reaction against the tyranny of an upstart intruder, to show
him they were not his subjects but his superiors. The previously unpublished private and public correspondence of these men reveals their deepest thoughts and feelings. A vast number of original documents have been transcribed and are published for the first time in full in the many appendices to the three volumes, of which this is Volume One. This work is one of the most detailed accounts of England in the seventeenth century which has ever been written, and it upsets many conventional notions of the period in question.
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‘In a remarkable work of meticulous and ground-breaking scholarship, Robert Temple puts all future historians of the English Revolution hugely in his debt with his profoundly researched investigation into King Charles I’s regicides. With a commitment to detail reminiscent of Sir Lewis Namier’s pioneering work on the 1760 Parliament, Temple illustrates quite what a close-knit cousinage it was that executed Charles in 1649,
a cabal of largely Puritan gentry whose family connections were quite
as important as their religion or place in society. This is a tremendously important work historically, and the product of a truly extraordinary amount of hard work in the archives, for which historians will be grateful for decades to come.’
-Professor Andrew Roberts
Gives proof that Oliver Cromwell was not a major player in the trial and execution of Charles I but was on the margins and not in control of any aspect of the process. The men in control are identified for the first time.
The setting up of the trial of the King is shown step by step, in greater detail than ever before.
The Parliamentary committees are vividly described, showing the infighting between the warring factions in Parliament, and exposing the tactics of the MPs who did not really want to defeat the King.
The New Model Army colonels sitting on the jury represented their regiments, of approximately 1000 men each. This was ‘more democratic’ than the MPs because Parliamentary constituencies often had less than ten voters.
The jury trying the King included eleven barristers and one judge, and had a sound legal basis and great legal expertise.
_________
‘In a remarkable work of meticulous and ground-breaking scholarship, Robert Temple puts all future historians of the English Revolution hugely in his debt with his profoundly researched investigation into King Charles I’s regicides. With a commitment to detail reminiscent of Sir Lewis Namier’s pioneering work on the 1760 Parliament, Temple illustrates quite what a close-knit cousinage it was that executed Charles in 1649,
a cabal of largely Puritan gentry whose family connections were quite
as important as their religion or place in society. This is a tremendously important work historically, and the product of a truly extraordinary amount of hard work in the archives, for which historians will be grateful for decades to come.’
-Professor Andrew Roberts