Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box SP2941

Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box SP2941

From the courts of Henry VIII to the Burma Railway, from the Congress of Berlin to the Elizabethan stage — this box follows extraordinary lives through five centuries of history, each one told with the forensic care and narrative drive that makes the past feel urgently present. Fifteen books that prove biography is history shown on a human face.

1. Statesman and Saint — Jasper Ridley — Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More never liked each other much, but Henry VIII destroyed them both with the same casual power; one of the most forensic accounts of Tudor politics ever written.
2. Two Journeys into Peril — Ken Sillcock — Two brothers writing to each other across the distances and silences of the Second World War; an intimate record of what it cost ordinary men to live through extraordinary times.
3. The Lamberts — Andrew Motion — Three generations of extraordinary men: a painter, a composer, and the man who managed The Who — each brilliant, each self-destructive, each shaped by the one who came before. One of the great family biographies.
4. Mary Tudor — Linda Porter — Bloody Mary was a myth built by Protestant propagandists, and Porter's meticulous, sympathetic portrait restores England's first ruling queen to her full complexity; a genuinely revisionist biography in the best sense.
5. The Tyrannicide Brief — Geoffrey Robertson — John Cooke invented the principle that no man is above the law, prosecuted a king, and was hanged for it after the Restoration; Robertson tells this story with the skill of a barrister and the passion of someone who actually believes it matters.
6. Elizabeth I — Jasper Ridley — The vanity, the intelligence, the extraordinary political instincts, and the loneliness at the centre of it all; Ridley's full biography of the queen who defined an age.
7. Ray Parkin's Odyssey — Pattie Wright — Ray Parkin survived the sinking of HMAS Perth, the Burma Railway, and years as a prisoner of war, and emerged to become one of Australia's finest writers and artists; a biography of a life that was itself an act of defiance.
8. American Pimpernel — Andy Marino — In 1940, a young American journalist went to Vichy France with a list of artists on Hitler's death list and spent thirteen months getting more than two thousand of them out alive. One of the great true stories of the war.
9. The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society — A.L. Rowse — The great Cornish historian captures Elizabethan England not through its monarchs but through the texture of daily life: the food, the clothes, the beliefs, the violence, and the extraordinary energy that produced Shakespeare.
10. Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years — Evgeny Pasternak — The poet's own son writes about the thirty years during which his father wrote Doctor Zhivago, was awarded the Nobel Prize, was forced to refuse it, and lived under constant threat from the Soviet state.
11. Greasy Grass — Johnny D. Boggs — The Battle of the Little Big Horn retold from the perspectives of both sides, in a historical novel that refuses to make heroes and villains where the history only made tragedy; spare, powerful, and meticulously researched.
12. Great Harry — Carolly Erickson — The young Henry VIII before he became a monster: the golden prince, the athlete, the intellectual, the husband who still believed in love; the essential corrective to the caricature.
13. A Prince of Journalists — Frank Giles — Henri de Blowitz scooped the Congress of Berlin, interviewed every leader in Europe, and did it all with theatrical flair that made him the most celebrated foreign correspondent of the nineteenth century; Giles tells the story with evident delight.
14. Portrait in a Mirror — Alexandra Hasluck — The life of a woman who became one of Australia's most respected historians, told in prose of the same care and precision she brought to everything she wrote; a memoir of considerable grace.
15. The Mid-Eighteenth Century — John Butt & Geoffrey Carnall — The Oxford History of English Literature volume covering the age of Johnson, Boswell, Gray, and Goldsmith; authoritative and essential for anyone who wants to understand what English literature was before Romanticism changed everything.