Author: Roald Dahl Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 1405910984 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 29
Book Description
Edward the Conqueror is a brilliant gem of a short story from Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail. In Edward the Conqueror, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a cat's curious behaviour comes between a husband and his wife . . . Edward the Conqueror is taken from the short story collection Kiss Kiss, which includes ten other devious and shocking stories, featuring the wife who pawns the mink coat from her lover with unexpected results; the priceless piece of furniture that is the subject of a deceitful bargain; a wronged woman taking revenge on her dead husband, and others. 'Unnerving bedtime stories, subtle, proficient, hair-raising and done to a turn.' (San Francisco Chronicle ) This story is also available as a Penguin digital audio download read by Juliet Stevenson. Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.
Author: Tom Licence Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300255586 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
An authoritative life of Edward the Confessor, the monarch whose death sparked the invasion of 1066 One of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, Edward the Confessor regained the throne for the House of Wessex and is the only English monarch to have been canonized. Often cast as a reluctant ruler, easily manipulated by his in-laws, he has been blamed for causing the invasion of 1066—the last successful conquest of England by a foreign power. Tom Licence navigates the contemporary webs of political deceit to present a strikingly different Edward. He was a compassionate man and conscientious ruler, whose reign marked an interval of peace and prosperity between periods of strife. More than any monarch before, he exploited the mystique of royalty to capture the hearts of his subjects. This compelling biography provides a much-needed reassessment of Edward’s reign—calling into doubt the legitimacy of his successors and rewriting the ending of Anglo-Saxon England.
Author: Frank Barlow Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300183828 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 406
Book Description
Frank Barlow's magisterial biography, first published in 1970 and now reissued with new material, rescues Edward the Confessor from contemporary myth and subsequent bogus scholarship. Disentangling verifiable fact from saintly legend, he vividly re-creates the final years of the Anglo-Danish monarchy and examines England before the Norman Conquest with deep insight and great historical understanding. "Deploying all the resources of formidable scholarship, [Barlow] has recovered the real Edward." — Spectator
Author: Bruce R. O'Brien Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 151280522X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
Sometime before the middle of the twelfth century, an anonymous English writer composed the Leges Edwardi, a treatise purporting to contain the laws that had been in force under the Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), cousin of William the Conqueror. The laws were said to have been spoken to William shortly after the Conquest by "English nobles who were wise men and learned in their law," recounting "the rules of their laws and customs" for the invading Norman king. When they had finished, the king wondered whether it might not be better for all of them to live under the law of his Viking ancestors; the English, however, protested that they preferred to live by their own preconquest laws. The king acquiesced, and thus, goes the story, were the laws of King Edward the Confessor authorized. Looking through the lens of this important—if spurious—treatise, God's Peace and King's Peace offers the first ground-level view of English law during the century in which the common law was born. Bruce R. O'Brien compares the Leges Edwardi to other memorials of legal policy and practice from before and after 1066, in both Normandy and England, and advances conclusions about the treatises' reliability on specific points of law. He also shows how the Laws of Edward the Confessor, taken as a record of English law at the conquest, came to be used as authoritative evidence behind the Magna Carta that the king was under the law, and how it was eventually declared a notorious forgery by seventeenth-century antiquaries and Enlightenment historians.
Author: Jonathan Sumption Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0241184215 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 112
Book Description
Edward III lived through bloody and turbulent times. His father was deposed by his mother and her lover when he was still a teenager; a third of England's population was killed by the Black Death midway through his reign; and the intractable Hundred Years War with France began under his leadership. Yet Edward managed to rule England for fifty years, and was viewed as a paragon of kingship in the eyes of both his contemporaries and later generations. Venerated as the victor of Sluys and Crécy and the founder of the Order of the Garter, he was regarded with awe even by his enemies. But he lived too long, and was ultimately condemned to see thirty years of conquests reversed in less than five. In this gripping new account of Edward III's rise and fall, Jonathan Sumption introduces us to a fêted king who ended his life a heroic failure.
Author: Hugh M. Thomas Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780742538405 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
Exploring the successful Norman invasion of England in 1066, this concise and readable book focuses especially on the often dramatic and enduring changes wrought by William the Conqueror and his followers. From the perspective of a modern social historian, Hugh M. Thomas considers the conquest's wide-ranging impact by taking a fresh look at such traditional themes as the influence of battles and great men on history and assessing how far the shift in ruling dynasty and noble elites affected broader aspects of English history. The author sets the stage by describing English society before the Norman Conquest and recounting the dramatic story of the conquest, including the climactic Battle of Hastings. He then traces the influence of the invasion itself and the Normans' political, military, institutional, and legal transformations. Inevitably following on the heels of institutional reform came economic, social, religious, and cultural changes. The results, Thomas convincingly shows, are both complex and surprising. In some areas where one might expect profound influence, such as government institutions, there was little change. In other respects, such as the indirect transformation of the English language, the conquest had profound and lasting effects. With its combination of exciting narrative and clear analysis, this book will capture students interest in a range of courses on medieval and Western history.
Author: Roald Dahl Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0718185641 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
PERFECT for fans of Roald Dahl. Think you know Dahl? Think again. There's still a whole world of Dahl to discover in a newly collected book of his deliciously dark tales for adults . . . 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these ten unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity. Among other stories, you'll meet the husband with a jealous fixation on the family cat, the landlady who wants her guests to stay forever, the man whose taste for pork leads him astray and the wife with a pathological fear of being late. Roald Dahl reveals even more about the darker side of human nature in seven other centenary editions: Cruelty, Lust, Deception, Innocence, Trickery, War and Fear.
Author: Roald Dahl
Author: Tom Licence
Author: Frank Barlow
Author: Edward Augustus Freeman
Author: Bruce R. O'Brien
Author: Jonathan Sumption
Author: Roald Dahl
Author: Joyce Goldenstern
Author: Hugh M. Thomas
Author: Roald Dahl