By Peter Gwyn
Proud, grasping, corrupt and pushed by way of overwhelming own ambition. Such is the conventional photo of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop if Tournai and Papal Legate. it really is a picture which Peter Gwyn examines, demanding situations and decisively overturns during this striking book.
From enormously humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a top of strength unsurpassed by means of the other British commoner. Peter Gwyn explores each element of the Cardinal's occupation - no longer least his dating with Henry VIII - and units it firmly in a vividly recreated Tudor international. The Wolsey who emerges is a guy of prodigious strength and skill, a tireless dispenser of justice, an enlightened reformer completely devoted to his king and nation - a guy who has been regularly misrepresented and maligned for four-and-a-half centuries.
Read or Download The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey PDF
Best fiction books
An exhilarating and robust novel a few younger boy lured to sea by means of the promise of experience and gift, with echoes of serious expectancies, Moby-Dick, and The Voyage of the Narwhal.
Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the tale of a nineteenth-century road urchin named Jaffy Brown. Following an incident with an escaped tiger, Jaffy is going to paintings for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of unique animals, along Tim, a great yet occasionally spitefully aggressive boy. hence starts off an extended, shut friendship fraught with ambiguity and competition.
Mr. Jamrach recruits the 2 boys to trap a fabled dragon throughout the process a three-year whaling expedition. Onboard, Jaffy and Tim benefit from the tough brotherhood of sailors and the brutal paintings of whale looking. They even reach catching the reptilian beast.
But while the ship’s whaling enterprise falls wanting expectations, the team starts off to treat the dragon—seething with feral strength in its cage—as undesirable good fortune, a sense that's cruelly strengthened while a violent typhoon sinks the send.
Drifting throughout an more and more hallucinatory ocean, the survivors, together with Jaffy and Tim, are compelled to confront their very own position within the animal country. Masterfully advised, wildly atmospheric, and thundering with stress, Jamrach’s Menagerie is a really haunting novel approximately friendship, sacrifice, and survival.
Because the shadows extend over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Downs - excessive existence and occasional lifestyles, society beauties and Whitechapel road ladies, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and acrobats, punters and thieves. complete households circulation alongside the Surrey back-roads, in the direction of the best race of the yr.
Translated by way of Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant.
Introduction and Notes by way of Harold Tarrant
An epic tale of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this old novel is determined in Carthage within the days following the 1st Punic conflict with Rome.
Number 1 big apple occasions bestselling writer Tami Hoag brings again her fan-favorite Minneapolis investigators Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska within the haunting new mystery The ninth woman.
"Kovac had noticeable extra lifeless our bodies than he may well count number: males, ladies, kids; sufferers of shootings, stabbings, strangulations, beatings; clean corpses and our bodies that were left for days within the trunks of autos within the useless of summer season. yet he had by no means obvious something really like this . . . "
On a frigid New Year's Eve in Minneapolis a tender woman's brutalized physique falls from the trunk of a motor vehicle into the trail of oncoming site visitors. Questions to whether she used to be alive or useless while she hit the icy pavement lead to her macabre nickname, Zombie Doe. Unidentified and unidentifiable, she is the 9th anonymous woman sufferer of the yr, and murder detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are charged with the duty of not just checking out who Zombie Doe is, yet who in her existence hated her adequate to wreck her. was once it own, or may perhaps it simply were a criminal offense of chance? Their maximum worry is that not just is she their 9th Jane Doe of the 12 months, yet that she could be the 9th sufferer of a vicious brief serial killer they've got come to name document Holiday.
Crisscrossing America's heartland, document vacation chooses his sufferers at random, snatching them in a single urban and leaving them in one other, continuously on a vacation. If Zombie Doe is one in all his, he has introduced his grotesque online game to a brand new and extra terrifying point. yet as Kovac and Liska start to discover the reality, they're going to locate that the monsters of their 9th girl's existence can have lived towards domestic. or even as one other younger lady disappears, they need to ask the query: that is the larger evil--the satan you recognize or the satan you don't?
Extra info for The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey
Sample text
Not yet. ' "We've got monochrome security videotape of a light coloured minivan entering the garage eleven minutes before the event. Can't see the plates for mud and dirt, and the camera angle isn't great. But it's probably a Dodge Caravan, not new, with aftermarket tinted windows. ' 'OK, obtained,' Emerson said. ' Rodin nodded. ' Emerson nodded in turn. 'Right where the new construction starts. Therefore the cone would have looked plausible. We have a witness who saw it in place at least an hour before.
Ready. Infiltration successful. Now wait until the time is right. He waited about seven minutes, keeping still, breathing low, clearing his mind. He looked at the library on his left. Above it and behind it a spur of the raised highway curled in on stilts, like it was embracing the big old limestone building, cradling it, protecting it from harm. Then it straightened a little and passed behind the black glass tower. It was about level with the fourth storey back there. The tower itself had the NBC peacock on a monolith near its main entrance, but the man with the rifle was sure that a small network affiliate didn't occupy the whole building.
He slid the papers across his desk to Rodin. Rodin picked them up and scanned them through, once, twice, carefully. Emerson watched his eyes. Saw him thinking the guy, the gun, the crime. It was like watching a Vegas slot machine line up three cherries. Bing bing bing! A total certainty. 'James Barr,' Rodin said, like he was savouring the sound of the words. He separated out the DL picture and gazed at it. ' 'Amen to that,' Emerson said, waiting for a compliment. I'll get the warrants,' Rodin said.