Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Stuart monarchy brought England and Scotland into one realm, albeit one still marked by political divisions that echo to this day. More importantly, perhaps, the Stuart era was marked by the cruelty of civil war, and the killing of a king. Shrewd and opinionated, James I's attitude toward the English parliament sowed the seeds of division that would split the country during the reign of his hapless heir, Charles I. Charles's nemesis, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament's great military leader and England's only dictator, began his career as a political liberator but ended it as much of a despot as the king he executed. In Peter Ackroyd's Rebellion, England's turbulent seventeenth century is vividly laid out before us, but so too is the cultural and social life of the period, notable for its literature, including Shakespeare's late masterpieces; Jacobean tragedy; the poetry of John Donne and John Milton; and Thomas Hobbes's great philosophical treatise, Leviathan. Ackroyd also gives us a very real sense of the lives of ordinary English men and women, lived out against a backdrop of constant disruption and uncertainty. -- Back cover.

A history of the development of London as a European epicenter of queer life.In  Queer City,  the acclaimed Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way-through the complete history and experiences of its gay and lesbian population.

\"In Revolution, Peter Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of his mad father, George III, and England was--again--at war with France, a war that would end with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Late Stuart and Georgian England marked the creation of the great pillars of the English state. The Bank of England was founded, as was the stock exchange; the Church of England was fully established as the guardian of the spiritual life of the nation, and parliament became the sovereign body of the nation with responsibilities and duties far beyond those of the monarch. It was a revolutionary era in English letters, too, a time in which newspapers first flourished and the English novel was born. It was an era in which coffee houses and playhouses boomed, gin flowed freely, and in which shops, as we know them today, began to proliferate in towns and villages. But it was also a time of extraordinary and unprecedented technological innovation, which saw England utterly and irrevocably transformed from a country of blue skies and farmland to one of soot and steel and coal\"-- Provided by publisher.

The best way to reach Elephantine from Aswan is by felucca; with the wind in its lateen sails, it skims across the full waters of the Nile. And when you see the river at such close quarters it becomes quite different - not the Nile of Cairo, which is like any sluggish urban river, not so different from the Thames or the Seine, and almost a foreign presence in the city. The Nile of Cairo is still revered for its history and its associations, perhaps, but somehow it is no longer representative, no longer a symbol. But the Nile of Aswan has retained its power just as it has kept its beauty, and when sailing on its calm surface you can understand how it was that these waters were considered to be the bringer of life - capacious, comforting, auspicious. George Sandys, an English traveler who visited Egypt around the beginning of the 17th century, wrote, ''Than the waters whereof there is none more sweete: being not unpleasantly cold, and of all others the most wholesome. Confirmed by that answer of Pescenius Niger unto his murmuring soldiery, 'What? From Elephantine it is only a short journey by felucca to another of the islands that lie between Aswan and the west bank - Kitchener's Island. This place, made from granite and the natural mud sediment of the Nile, was presented to Lord Kitchener after his successful campaign in the Sudan, and he brought to it a variety of equatorial and subequatorial plants. Landing on Kitchener is like landing in another garden of Eden, for at once you are surrounded by guavas, date palms, ginger, cinnamon, roses, jasmine, hibiscus, figs, lemons, strawberries, oak trees, camphor trees, ebonies, pinks and the curious capon tree. This is nature in profusion, and you feel here, more than anywhere else in Egypt, the beneficent force of water in a desert land. It truly means life. The avenues of huge white royal palms look as if they might go on forever, but then suddenly you realize that you are indeed upon a very small island: the land drops away, the waters of the Nile are in front of you and there, no more than a few yards ahead, stretches the yellow desert. Aswan itself is unlike other Egyptian cities precisely because of its proximity to a Nile that has retained its original power and proportions. It is true that the people of Upper Egypt are different from the Cairenes or the Alexandrians: here, in the south of the country, they tend to be more rural and therefore more conservative. Western dress is, of course, customary in Cairo, but in Aswan it is less noticeable. And there are many Nubians here, most of them dispossessed after their ancient land was flooded by Lake Nasser during the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960's. Life is slow, relaxed. Aswan is also relatively close to Luxor, to Karnak and to the Valley of the Kings, and it is possible to see in this riverscape the lineaments of an older Egypt.

''To the world,'' he said, ''I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and a dandy merely - it is not wise to show one's heart to the world.'' But there was one other paradox on which he rested his case, even in the well of the Old Bailey itself: ''Art is the most serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.'' So it is that although he turned conversation into an art, and his personality into a symbol, his real achievement lay elsewhere. Indeed there is a sense in which [Oscar Wilde] was the greatest artist of his time. Some of his poems, most notably ''The Ballad of Reading Gaol,'' have survived the work of more single-minded versifiers; he invented the art of modern criticism, just as he reinvented the art both of the parable and of the prose poem for a modern audience; as a letter-writer he is unequaled in his century, and no one can read ''De Profundis,'' a letter he wrote to [Alfred Douglas] from his prison cell, without being almost as moved by it as he was; with ''Salome'' he created symbolic drama in English; ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'' has been described as the only French novel ever written in English; and of course he brought comedy back to the London stage. The 19th century was on its deathbed and still he managed to make it laugh at itself. In fact, one has only to read his criticism - and essays like ''The Critic as Artist'' and ''The Decay of Lying'' are as fine in their way as the finest of his plays - to see how serious a critique of his age he actually provided. His most inspired role, beyond that of dandy or Uranian (the 19th-century expression for those whom less sympathetic contemporaries called sodomites), was that of the esthetic philosopher: this was, you might say, a discipline he knew by heart, and in his deceptively simple and unarguably witty formulations he fashioned a vision of the world as subtle as that of [Walter Pater], as devastating as that of Schopenhauer. ''The truths of metaphysics,'' he said, ''are the truths of masks.'' He was often (and wrongly) accused of insincerity, but he pre-empted this charge when he declared that ''insincerity is a method by which we can multiply our personalities.'' In his disavowal of conventional ethics he is thoroughly Nietzschean. ''Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither,'' he remarked. ''It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.'' Both art and conduct became the supreme reality, therefore, and there were times when he did not attempt to distinguish between the two. There were even occasions when he declared that his only concern was to turn his own personality into a work of art - although, in a climate so hostile to the pursuit of personal perfection as that of England, such an art was bound to turn into one of open defiance. ''I was a problem,'' he said with one eye on Victorian society and the other on the legal system, ''for which there was no solution.''

IN his previous memoir, ''God Stand Up for Bastards,'' [David Leitch], well known as a writer for such British publications as The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the New Statesman, sent out the literary equivalent of a smoke signal: ''Mother,'' he asked, ''where are you?'' The title of that book suggests the problem; at the age of 8 days, the infant David had been given away by his natural mother, to a prosperous couple who answered her advertisement in The London Daily Express. (It is appropriate, perhaps, that the fate of so prominent a journalist should have been decided by a newspaper.) He never really expected to see his mother again, but a year after his book's anguished inquiry, she answered. ''Family Secrets'' is the subsequent account of one man's journey toward his unknown parents, which was essentially a journey toward his unknown self. It is one of the oldest stories in the world, at least as old as Telemachus, who set out to find his father, Odysseus, after the Trojan War, and it has survived so long precisely because of its power. But even though that familiar search has been the material of epic and fairy tale, in ''Family Secrets'' it becomes a much more problematic and unsettling business. The ''secrets'' of Mr. Leitch's title have to be extracted painfully, from people who are often confused, difficult and, in certain respects, unlovable.