The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors - Rilegato

Jones, Dan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571288073 ISBN 13: 9780571288076

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2014

Riassunto

"The Hollow Crown is exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history...Jones's material is thrilling...There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling." (Sunday Telegraph). The fifteenth century saw the crown of England change hands seven times as the great families of England fought to the death for power, majesty and the right to rule. The Hollow Crown completes Dan Jones' epic history of medieval England, and describes how the Plantagenets tore themselves apart to be finally replaced by the Tudors. Some of the greatest heroes and villains in British history were thrown together in these turbulent times: Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt and prudent rule at home marked the high point of the medieval monarchy; Edward IV, who was handed his crown by the scheming soldier Warwick the Kingmaker, before their alliance collapsed into a fight to the death; and the last Plantagenet, Richard III, who stole the throne and murdered his own nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Finally, the Tudors arrived - but even their rule was only made certain in the 1520s, when Henry VIII ruthlessly hunted down his family's last remaining enemies. In the midst this tumult, chivalry was reborn, the printing press arrived and the Renaissance began to flourish. With vivid descriptions of the battle of Towton, where 28,000 men died in a single morning, and the Battle of Bosworth Field, at which Richard III was hacked down, this is the real story behind Shakespeare's famous history plays.

Su questo libro

Recensione

The Hollow Crown is exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history ... Jones's material is thrilling ... There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling. (Jessie Childs Sunday Telegraph)

Dan Jones's fine new history [...] locates the conflict not in the tedious familiarity of modern power plays, but in the fascinating strangeness of the attitudes and belief systems of that distant age: a world in which piety and politics converged, and where the outcome of war was nothing less than the manifestation of divine judgement. [...] Tautly structured, elegantly written and finely attuned to the values and sensibilities of the age, The Hollow Crown is probably the best introduction to the Wars of the Roses currently in print. (John Adamson Mail on Sunday 2014-09-14)

[Jones] is an extraordinary storyteller whose scene-setting is intensely visual and whose characters spring from the page. He has a gift for an arresting turn of phrase [...] and [...] highlights engaging details: that coronation rituals often bred head lice, and that Henry VI was shocked by, and abhorred, nakedness. Finally, he is comically wry [...] . This is narrative history at its most brilliant. [...] A Milanese ambassador in 1471 likened the task of describing the ever-changing nature of events in England to suffering torture. With history in such skilful hands as these, reading about them is anything but. (Suzannah Lipscomb The New Statesman 2014-10-24)

Henry VI was a born saint - and that was just the problem as Dan Jones shows in this racy and vigorous new narrative history. Picking up where he left off at the end of his acclaimed The Plantagenets with Henry VI's father, the incomparable warrior-king Henry V, Jones shows that a successful medieval king needed to rule strongly (but not tyrannically), father plenty of healthy sons and keep defeating the French (Christopher Hart Sunday Times)

...the gloriously resonant title title of Dan Jones's brilliant account of the Wars of the Roses - The Hollow Crown - conjures up Shakespeare's influence not just on our language but on the ways in which we think about our past ... Jones is a born storyteller, peopling the terrifying uncertainties of each moment with a superbly drawn cast of characters and powerfully evoking the brutal realities of civil war. With gripping urgency he shows this calamitous conflict unfold. (Helen Castor Evening Standard)

Jones, though a young man, is a traditional narrative historian in the mould of Starkey, Taylor and Trevelyan. In other words, he tells a good story. That is a good thing, since storytelling has gone out of favour among so many historians. (Gerard DeGroot The Times)

If you're a fan of Game of Thrones or The Tudors, then Dan Jones's swashbucklingly entertaining slice of late medieval history will be right up your alley. Exploring the world of the War of the Roses with a near-novelistic degree of pace and intrigue, while always remaining scholarly and insightful, The Hollow Crown is every bit as entertaining and readable as Jones's previous history blockbuster, The Plantagenets... a work of popular history that has as many cliffhanging moments of surprise and suspense as any TV miniseries, and is every bit as entertaining. (Alex Larman Daily Express)

Jones navigates the violence and treacheries that follow in such vivid prose that everything, even a non-battle, seems incredibly dramatic and exciting ... Fast-moving, witty and humane, The Hollow Crown is narrative history at its best. (Leanda De Lisle Literary Review)

[Jones'] greatest skill as a historical writer is to somehow render sprawling, messy epochs such as this one into manageable, easily digestible matter; he is keenly attuned to what should be served up and what should be omitted. It makes for an engrossing read and a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the Lancastrian-Yorkist struggle. (Sean McGlynn The Spectator 2014-09-13)

Descrizione del libro

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors, from Dan Jones - the celebrated author of The Plantagenets - is an exciting, fast-paced history of the Wars of the Roses.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571288073
• ISBN 13: 9780571288076
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 480