The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) marked a golden age in English history. There was a musical and literary renaissance, most famously and enduringly in the form of the plays of Shakespeare (2016...

Religion, politics and fear: how England was transformed by the Tudors.The English Reformation was a unique turning point in English history. Derek Wilson retells the story of how the Tudor monarchs transformed...

Derek Wilson examines a set of relationships which illustrate just how dangerous life was in the court of the Tudor lion. He tells the interlocking stories of six men - all, curiously, called Thomas...

Peter I, Emperor of all the Russias, has been a subject of curiosity and scrutiny for almost three centuries. But what was he really like? Physically, he was a strong, tall man (6' 8'' inches) who unlike...

One of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, Hans Holbein the Younger was also a complex and fascinating man who knew Erasmus, Thomas More, Henry VIII and many of the sixteenth century's wielders of...

Martin Luther changed Europe and, through Europe, the world. It was he who finally exposed the myth of a unified Latin Christendom, which was only held together by crusades, heresy hunts, Inquisition,...

The greatest of medieval monarchs, Charles the Great (742-814) towers over every notion we have of national heroes and semi-mythical champions. His military conquests exceeded those of Julius Caesar....

The image of Charles II as a randy monarch who dragged the crown through the moral mire and irredeemably weakened its position has persisted throughout the three centuries since John Evelyn gave his judgement....

In the political ferment of the Tudor century one family above all others was always at the troubled centre of court and council. During those years the Dudleys were never far from controversy. Three...

England, 1154. As Henry II seizes the throne after years of turmoil, a new dynasty is poised to haul this hitherto turbulent nation out from the Dark Ages and transform it into the nation state we recognize...

Henry VIII changed the course of English life more completely than any monarch since the Conquest. In the portraits of Holbein, Henry Tudor stands proud as one of the most powerful figures in renaissance...

"Going round the world" is an idea that has excited people ever since it was realized that the earth was a sphere. The appeal has something to do with encompassing all the known environment and exploring...

During the brief reign of the Queen Mary, Walsingham was a Protestant exile in Italy. Returning home when Elizabeth assumed the throne, from 1570 he became a diplomat to the arch-pragmatist Queen. He...

When the Master of St Mary's House, Cambridge, hires Tim Lacy to retrieve a collection of eighteenth-century documents willed to it by a wealthy past member of the college, he omits to mention that these...

One of the most fabulous treasures of the Renaissance, the Borgia Chalice, carries with it a dark aura - for legend has it that the notorious Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, could use this cup to poison...

When the Dresden Text - a treasured fragment of medieval illuminated manuscript - is stolen from a prestigious New York gallery, its loss hits Tim Lacy hard. His firm was responsible for the safety of...

'A dazzling chronicle, a bracing challenge to modernity's smug assumptions' - Bryce Christensen, Booklist'O what a world of profit and delightOf power, of honour and omnipotenceIs promised to the studious...

Watson begrudgingly visits relatives in Oxford only to find a case he did not know existed. He learns his dear friend was never at liberty to share the tale. Years have passed since the affair and with...

At a meeting in East London, art dealer Catherine Lacy is shown six paintings from a previously undiscovered artist, Aristide Bertrand, who moved in the same circles as Van Gogh. She is enormously excited,...

Lanner Castle is a forbidding gothic building on an island in tiny Loch Huich. The locals know little about its present owner, the reclusive Mr Robertson, except that he is wealthy, writes antiquarian...

On a sultry summer night in the Cotswolds, Nathaniel and Katherine Gye are guests at a Civil War fancy-dress party. The theme of the occasion is apt because Tripletree, the Jacobean manor house where...

They say that history is written by the winners. Not according to Derek Wilson. In this fascinating, revelatory book, Derek Wilson tells the story from the point of view of the losers - collating a...

A haunting in St. Thomas's College, Cambridge bitterly divides the college, and the Cambridge branch of the Psychic Investigation Unit is invited to carry out an experiment to settle the unrest. But when...

The first case for Tim Lacy, ex-SAS officer, security expert and well-respected figure in the art world, a circle made up of dubious dealers, unscrupulous collectors, fraudsters, crime bosses and bona...

When paranormal investigator and Cambridge lecturer Dr. Nathaniel Gye is commissioned at a séance to find a dead man's killer, he dismisses the incident as a clumsy fraud by a fake medium. But when Nathaniel's...

The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) marked a golden age in English history. There was a musical and literary renaissance, most famously and enduringly in the form of the plays of Shakespeare (2016...