What were the essential qualities for a military commander during the Hundred Years War? How important were strategic vision, tactical skill and powers of leadership in medieval warfare? These are the questions that Peter Hoskins explores in this perceptive study of the careers of Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince who led the English army to victory at the Battle of Poitiers and the opponent he defeated, the French King Jean II 'The Good'. Their contrasting characters and backgrounds are considered as is the military tradition of their time, but the primary focus of the book is a close comparison of their strengths and weaknesses as soldiers as they were revealed on campaign and on the battlefield. The Black Prince was one of the most admired generals of his generation, a charismatic leader, a shrewd tactician and strategist and a decisive commander. He was only 16 at the Battle of Crecy and 26 when he won his great victory at Poitiers. In contrast King Jean at eleven years older than Edward, was impulsive, driven more by pride, his sense of honour and personal objectives than strategic priorities. He was just 27 when he commanded the forces besieging Aiguillon. When he was put to the ultimate test at Poitiers he lost control of his army, while the Black Prince took the initiative personally to secure victory against the odds. Peter Hoskins analyses the command leadership qualities of the prince and the king according to the principles of war enunciated by Sun Tzu and Vegetius as well as the modern principles of war of the United Kingdom armed forces. He gives readers a fascinating insight into the nature of command and the conduct of war in the Middle Ages. Includes the Poitiers Campaign 1356 when Jean was defeated and Battle of Nájera 1367, the Sieges of Aiguillon 1346, the Black Prince's Chevauchee in the Languedoc 1355 and Normandy and Breteuil 1356 sieges. Colour illus. 17 maps, 208 pages.

Nell Gwyn would be aged about 10 when Charles II became king. At this time Nell lived in a slum with her mother and sister but soon she joined the theatre in Drury Lane, initially selling oranges. Women were now allowed to act on stage for the first time and Nell was spotted by two entrepreneurs who began training her as a comedienne. Following a spell in the country when the plague struck, Nell started to make a name for herself and was described by Pepys as "pretty, witty, Nell Gwyn". When her chance came, she directed a wink at the Royal box and was rewarded by an invitation to Charles's apartments. A famous liaison had begun, but Nell had rivals. One of them was the actress Moll Davis, and the jealous Nell contrived to give Moll a laxative before one of her evenings with the King, assisted by her friend Aphra Behn, a well-known female playwright and spy. Nell was much in demand as an actress, performing in plays by Dryden and Ben Jonson as well as more popular entertainments. She was becoming a star, and the King was impressed. He now spent more time with her than with his long-time mistress Barbara Villiers. In 1669 Nell became pregnant and gave birth to a son but was secure in the knowledge that she was now the main mistress, and was granted a house in Pall Mall soon afterwards. Nell was eventually supplanted by Louise de Kerouaille, whom Lady Worcester insulted by calling her a "tall French bitch" before kicking her repeatedly. Nell continued her friendship with the King and his associates such as Rochester until the end of her life, and this book details some fascinating examples of her involvement in political intrigue, including making sure that Charles was visited by a Catholic priest before his death. 184pp, black and white reproductions.

Sub-titled 'The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion,' rightly regarded as the founder of Egyptology. Ancient Egypt fascinated the ancient Greeks and Romans including Alexander the Great. It still fascinates us more than any other ancient civilisation, but no Greek or Roman could read the elaborate Egyptian hieroglyphs. For almost two millennia the hieroglyphic script became a 'lost language', until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's soldiers in Egypt in 1799. Despite the efforts of some of Europe's most intelligent scholars, including the English polymath Thomas Young, to crack the hieroglyphic code, it was an impoverished, arrogant and brilliant child of the French Revolution Jean-François Champollion who made the vital breakthrough. This finely illustrated biography charts his dramatic life and achievements and how, against the odds, Champollion led an expedition to Egypt with royal backing, lived in the tomb of the Valley of the Kings, and made the voices of the Pharaohs and their subjects speak. His obsession eventually drove him to an early death at the age of only 41. Chapters also cover the Curator at the Louvre and In Search of Ramesses and the First Professor of Egyptology. A memorable and beautifully written historical detective story, first time translated into English and here in fine heavyweight Oxford University Press hardback. Very well illustrated throughout, 272pp.

In the dying years of the 18th century, the corridors of Windsor echoed to the footsteps of six princesses. They were Charlotte Princess Royal (1766-1828), Augusta (1768-1840), Elizabeth (1770-1840) he "farmer", Mary Duchess of Gloucester (1776-1857), Sophia (1777-1848), and Amelia (1783-1810), the daughters of King George III and Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Though more than 15 years divided the births of the eldest sister from the youngest, these princesses all shared a longing for escape. Faced with their father's illness and their mother's dominance, for all but one a life away from the seclusion of the royal household seemed like an unobtainable dream. Tutored in the arts of royal womanhood, they were trained from infancy in the skills vial to a regal wife but as the king's illness ravaged him, husbands and opportunities slipped away. Yet even in isolation, the lives of the princesses were filled with incident. From secret romances to dashing equerries, rumours of pregnancy, clandestine marriage and even a run-in with Napoleon, each princess was the leading lady in her own story, whether tragic or inspirational. In The Royal Nunnery: Daughters of George III, take a wander through the hallways of the royal palaces, where the king's endless ravings echo deep into the night. Raised in seclusion, although one would escape, her sisters were destined to remain the prisoners of a turbulent royal household. From Windsor to Württemberg via summer jaunts to Weymouth, their lives were forever changed by the infamous madness of George III. Meet urbane equerries and gossiping governesses, secret marriages to scandalous pregnancies and leeches to love affairs in a world where protocol was everything. 32 illus, 186 pages.

Sir Anthony Sherley (1565-1633) was one of three brothers from a Sussex gentry family, whose adventures abroad fascinated their contemporaries. Their doings were celebrated and exaggerated in printed pamphlets and a play on the London stage but they are scarcely known today. Anthony was a soldier fighting in France and the Netherlands, and then an unsuccessful privateer before his patron, the Earl of Essex, chose him to lead a group on a mission to Ferrara, which proved abortive. Sherley then undertook on his own initiative to take his young gentlemen adventurers on a highly risky journey across Turkey to Persia. He hoped to persuade the Shah Abbas (the ruthless King who became an Iranian legend) to ally with the West against their mutual enemy, Ottoman Turkey empire. Surprisingly, Shah Abbas the Great (1587-1629) approved the plan, and sent Sherley back to Europe as his ambassador. But after that things went badly wrong. Essex lost all influence at court and was eventually executed for treason. Sherley was refused permission to return to England and was forced to re fashion himself as a cunning "intelligencer" or spy in the multinational and dangerous world of Venice. After various episodes in Venice and Morocco 1598-1606, he ended up in the pay of Spain and was chosen to command a fleet created to stop pirates from attacking Spanish possessions. After the failure of this project he was forced to retire to Granada, and lived the rest of his life on a meagre royal pension. But he continued trying to give advice, based on his past experiences, to the king of Spain and his ministers. The book will concentrate on Sherley's career and spying, and will broaden the theme by including chapters on his father and his two brothers, and in particular on Persia and Shah Abbas, the Persian king whom he met. Anthony was an irascible, complex character, often derided and disliked. This biography is more sympathetic than previous ones and discusses his self-fashioning and his belief in his personal honour, both of which might account for some of his misdemeanours, especially after the death of his patron. Map, 16 pages of illus, 174 pages.

Sub-titled 'The Special Relationship Between Russia's Last Tsarina and Queen Victoria'. When Queen Victoria's second daughter Princess Alice married the Prince Louis of Hesse and Rhine in 1862, even her own mother described the ceremony as 'more of a funeral than a wedding' thanks to the fact that it took place shortly after the death of Alice's beloved father Prince Albert. Sadly, the young princess' misfortunes didn't end there and when she also died prematurely, her four motherless daughters were taken under the wing of their formidable grandmother, Victoria. Alexandra was just six years old when her mother died of diphtheria in 1878. Alix, the youngest of Alice's daughters and allegedly one of the most beautiful princesses in Europe, was a special favourite of the elderly queen, who hoped that she would marry her cousin Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, and one day reign beside him as Queen. However, the spirited and stubborn Alix had other ideas. Alexandra had already fallen in love with the Tsarevitch Nicholas of Russia - a match that horrified her grandmother. Melanie Clegg takes a fresh and intimate look at the close relationship that existed between the last Empress of Russia who became Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and her grandmother Queen Victoria. Although Victoria was disappointed by Alexandra's decision to marry Nicholas, the two continued to correspond until the end of her life in 1901. Interspersed with snippets from diaries and letters. 16 pages of illus. 216 pages.

In 1904, American artist Thomas Eakins gave us a painting of a beautiful woman, rich in ineffable sadness. Deftly with a small brush and the marriage of colour he painted her lustrous eyes, the right one in the light, with a hint of a tear forming. Edith Mahon is said not to have liked the picture and she herself was a talented English pianist and part of a circle of musicians Eakins knew. In the early indoor pictures of his sisters Frances and Margaret, painted soon after his return from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Luxemborg Garden and Spain, there is a foretelling of the strength and anguish that he would find later in his career. When he went outdoors, the young man and the athlete took part in the sports he depicted - men on boats under sail, at bat, or bent to the wonderful exhaustion of rowing. Eakins' father Benjamin was a second-generation Irish American who moved to Philadelphia from rural Pennsylvania, a calligrapher and writing master who managed to provide his artist son with a lifelong where-with-all to paint without regard to whether he sold a canvas or did not. With almost photographic quality, some of the most striking images are reproduced in the book, some in colour plates such as the Gross Clinic of 1875 showing a bloody operation, the Cello Player, a Portrait of Walt Whitman, Baby at Play and photographs of Eakins and his friends in his studio or sailboats racing on the Delaware. His paintings offer an uncertain vision of the changing times, from the shadow of his mother's depression to his fraught identity as a married man with homosexual inclinations, to his failure to sell his work in his day. Eakins was a man marked equally by passion and by melancholy and his biographer defines the artistic moments and key relationships, with his wife Susan MacDowell, his subject and friend the writer Walt Whitman, and with several of the leading scientists of his time to shed brilliant light on his motivations as one of the founders of American Realism. The book is a powerful testament to the lasting vision of a man ahead of his time. 237pp, paperback with dozens of images and colour plates.

In Georgian England, few men were more fashionable or more eligible than George, Prince of Wales, heir to one of the most powerful thrones in the world. Wild, glamorous, and with a penchant for beautiful women, the 57 year marriage of George III and Queen Caroline was by far the most fruitful of any of the kings of Georgian Britain. From the birth of George IV in 1762 to that of princess Amelia in 1783, Queen Charlotte was either carrying a child or recovering from a birth for more than 20 years. Maria Fitzherbert was a twice-widowed Roman Catholic with a natural aversion to trouble. When she married the prince in a secret ceremony conducted in her Mayfair sitting room, she opened the door on three decades of heartbreak. Cast aside by her husband one minute, pursued tirelessly by him the next, Maria's clandestine marriage was anything but blissful. It was also the worst kept secret in England. Caroline of Brunswick was George's official bride. Little did she know that her husband was marrying for money and when she reached her new home in England, she found him so drunk that he couldn't even walk to the altar. Caroline might not have her husband's love, but the public adored her. In a world where radicalism was stirring, it was a recipe for disaster. Maria and Caroline never met but navigated the choppy waters of marriage to a capricious, womanising king-in-waiting. With a queen on trial for adultery and the succession itself in the balance, Britain had never seen scandal like it. The King's two marriages provided acres of newsprint and oceans of gossip. 32 illus. 201 pages.

Everyone has heard, the story of Mozart's life and death: unappreciated, victimised by his rival Salieri, ending up in a pauper's grave. Except that the truth is rather different. This big, detailed biography gives us another Mozart: successful, full of joie de vivre, excited by the new commissions that were coming in and comfortably off with the revenue from his popular operas. When he fell ill in 1791 Wolfgang was enjoying the success of The Magic Flute: "one can feel how this opera is rising and rising". His letters from the same period are full of irrepressible high spirits, describing a practical joke he played on his character Papageno by coming in with a musical accompaniment at the wrong time. This exuberant lark does not seem like someone grappling with his own mortality, but at some point in those last few weeks he did sense that his time had come. In later years his wife Constanze recollected that while composing the Requiem Mozart had claimed that someone was poisoning him. The author of this book is a composer himself and his detailed appreciation of Mozart's musical genius avoids too much technical jargon while taking the reader into the act of creation. Mozart's move to Vienna from Salzburg in 1781 was the turning point in his career under the patronage of Emperor Joseph II. The author argues that the revolutionary undertones sometimes identified in earlier operas such as The Marriage of Figaro are the result of the fact that Mozart was using someone else's libretto and do not imply any revolutionary tendencies of his own. An interesting sidelight on his genius is that the manuscript of the famous aria "Se vuol ballare", which seems to flow so naturally, was changed by Mozart several times even on the final autograph copy. Mozart composed in layers, creating a skeletal score and then adding in the detail. The Flute was a true act of collaboration with his librettist Schikaneder and for that reason Swafford judges the opera to be his greatest work. Mozart's childhood as a prodigy with his sister Nannerl, his private life, marriage to Constanze and the loss of his children are sympathetically integrated into the story. 810pp, colour reproductions. Remainder mark.

"Knowing the old, you well understand the new." This motto is inscribed on a bust of the 18th century antiquarian Charles Townley, for whom the house at 14 Queen Anne's Gate, formerly 7 Park Street, was built to display his collection of antiquities. In this impressive house of classical design, described by a contemporary German newspaper as the most magnificent private museum in the whole of Europe, visitors would find a collection of Roman sculpture unrivalled outside Italy, as well as non-western art, a library and a collection devoted to understanding the "universal generative spirit" worshipped by early civilisations. Townley was keenly interested in the esoteric and the occult. This book follows No 14 from its conception, construction and alterations through to our own time. St James's Park, now at the heart of the British establishment, was originally Henry VIII's deer park and later became the home of eccentrics and radicals. Charles Townley was a marginal character, Catholic and bisexual, educated at Douai, who preferred to converse in Italian or French and lived a libertine and rakish life. Catholics were prohibited from holding public office, and the author associates Townley's love of Bacchic mystery cults with the fact that like Catholicism they operated outside mainstream religion. As a veteran of the Grand Tour, Townley had bought a Piranesi engraving from Piranesi himself, and true to tradition he shipped back home large crates of marbles. The paintings he acquired included "A Group of Connoisseurs" by Richard Conway, depicting himself and his friends admiring the Townley Venus. Townley was predominantly gay at a time when it could be a capital offence, though he may also have had an illegitimate child, but his expertise gave him entrée to the highest circles. By the late 1780s he was the most trusted authority on classical antiquity in Britain, advising the future George IV on the decoration of Carlton House. Other works of art included the Townley Discobolus, a bust of Agrippina, later designated Isis, priapic works acquired from Cardinal Albani, and Poussin's "Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem". 128pp, colour reproductions.
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