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Just Flesh and Blood is the highly anticipated conclusion in the popular trilogy about Queen Elizabeth I. 'A terrible dread took hold in my belly. The only bed left to me was my deathbed and I was not ready for that – not yet. No, not yet.' Although she lies unmoving on a pile of cushions, Elizabeth is a survivor. The unwanted daughter of an executed queen, she endured the perils of her childhood to take the throne as Queen of England. Just a girl at coronation, Elizabeth has now ruled for over four decades, withstanding political upheavals, war and plots against her life. But as she contemplates the successes and failures of that life, she weighs up all that she has relinquished – love, marriage, children, family of any kind – for power. She was not just a queen, but a flesh-and-blood woman – will her final moments be ones of regret? In this bittersweet book readers will be filled with admiration and compassion for a woman who grasped her destiny with both hands and, by doing so, made herself one of the greats of history.

Daughter of the tyrannical Henry VIII and sister of the embittered Queen Mary, Elizabeth Idid well to survive her childhood. Clever, learned and skilled indiplomacy, as Queen she presided over a golden age of literature,exploration and discovery.

The dual biography of two remarkable women - Catherine Parr and Anne Askew. One was the last queen of a powerful monarch, the second a countrywoman from Lincolnshire. But they were joined together in their love for the new learning - and their adherence to Protestantism threatened both their lives. Both women wrote about their faith, and their writings are still with us. Powerful men at court sought to bring Catherine down, and used Anne Askew's notoriety as a weapon in that battle. Queen Catherine Parr survived, while Anne Askew, the only woman to be racked, was burned to death. This book explores their lives, and the way of life for women from various social strata in Tudor England.

This paper interrogates how Reynolds's Newspaper covered the Great Exhibition in the first year of its run. By harnessing his newspaper's critique of the exhibition, George W. M. Reynolds promoted himself as an enemy to the aristocracy and a friend to his desired reading public of working people. Throughout 1851, the newspaper articulated a counter-narrative to the exhibition's rhetoric of class unity: first, by drawing on melodramatic Old Corruption narratives through its negative representation of Prince Albert, and second, by positioning Reynolds's as an advocate for workmen on the Crystal Palace. This coverage illustrates Reynolds's complex but lucrative position at the intersection of popular culture and radical politics.

Taking its title from Umberto Eco’s postscript to The Name of the Rose, the novel that inaugurated the New Historical Fiction in the early 1980s, Constructing the World provides a guide to the genre’s defining characteristics. It also serves as a lively account of the way Shakespeare, Marlowe, Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth I, and their contemporaries have been depicted by such writers as Anthony Burgess, George Garrett, Patricia Finney, Barry Unsworth, and Rosalind Miles. Innovative historical novels written during the past two or three decades have transformed the genre, producing some extraordinary bestsellers as well as less widely read serious fiction. Shakespearean scholar Martha Tuck Rozett engages in an ongoing conversation about the genre of historical fiction, drawing attention to the metacommentary contained in “Afterwords” or “Historical Notes”; the imaginative reconstruction of the diction and mentality of the past; the way Shakespearean phrases, names, and themes are appropriated; and the counterfactual scenarios writers invent as they reinvent the past.

A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden is a bildungsroman that explores its heroine, Frederica Potter's, complicated coming of age during 1953, the year of the Coronation of Elizabeth II. Likewise, the Coronation itself can be considered a bildungsroman of Elizabeth, and of Britain. Both novel and Coronation link the development of individual young women to that of the nation: on the one hand, they are constrained by an ideology of domesticity that channels them into marriage and motherhood; on the other, they derive symbolic – and perhaps some real – power through the way national myths of identity revolve around their likeness.

A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, for example, takes place in 1953, its complex actions centred on the staging of a verse-drama written to celebrate the Coronation and which, like Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, invokes the first Elizabeth by way of heralding a new Elizabethan age (a comparison which the Queen herself was swift to disclaim).3 In R. F. Delderfield's bestselling A Horseman Riding By trilogy, published in the late 1960s, the Coronation of Elizabeth (unlike those of her father and grandfather) seems hardly an event to celebrate as Elizabeth looks set to reign over a land which is constantly under threat of erosion and which itself is now feminized and constrained: 'By the time the tepid Coronation festivities were over the estate had become a tight-waisted island, bounded by the new coastal road in the south and the new four-lane Paxtonbury road in the north.'4 In Paul Craddock's insular world, traditional crafts are fetishised as they are commoditised, and traditional artefacts of the past are now trivialised as objects of mass reproduction, souvenirs for the English native now turned indigenous tourist. [...]his or her search (in contrast to the historian) is primarily an aesthetic one, an attempt to erase the actual past in order to create an imagined past which is available for consumption.'13 The creation of that imagined past is constituted as a postmodern memorial of the nation and the story of a family and it examines how one shapes and is shaped by the other, fatalistically as well as contingently. [...]his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.14 The Body politic protects and upholds the institutional and constitutional actions of Monarchy over the individual frailties of the mortal incumbents of its Divine office: the concept of the Body politic offers continuity through its emphasis on seamless succession, hence, the King is dead, long live the King. [...]is domesticity mixed with sovereignty; and when the mother has kissed her children goodnight, the Queen goes to meet her Prime Minister.32 Such sentimental and unquestionably powerful fantasy is offered as a vignette of family life and is a clear exemplification of the kind of idealism attached to the Royal Family, as Annette Kuhn has noted:

At the Bottom of the World Bill Nye and Gregory Mone #18 Children's Frontlist Fiction Science educator and TV personality Nye and science journalist and children's book author Mone launch the middle-grade Jack and the Geniuses series. Top 10 Overall Rank Title Author Imprint Units 1 Old School O'Reilly/Feirstein Holt 41,262 2 Thirteen Reasons Why Jay Asher Razorbill 31,849 3 The Black Book Patterson/Ellis Little, Brown 31,386 4 All By Myself, Alone Mary Higgins Clark...