Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher & Mick Jagger

Eminent Elizabethans

Piers Brendon, author of the bestselling Eminent Edwardians, turns his sharp and witty eye to four characters who have illuminated the age of Elizabeth II: Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher and Mick Jagger.

What links Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles and Mick Jagger? 
 
Each have illuminated our Elizabethan age in their own, inimitable, way. 
 
Margaret Thatcher - the first female Prime Minister, who dedicated herself with messianic zeal to breaking the mould of post-war British politics 
 
Rupert Murdoch - the billionaire media mogul whose empire, built on an ethical void, has polluted the channels of communication from London to Sydney, from New York to New Guinea 
 
Prince Charles - the royal dilettante whose erratic exploits shook the throne and put his own succession to it at risk 
 
Mick Jagger - lead singer of the Rolling Stones, who embodied the sixties counter-culture of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll yet aspired to be a gentleman and accepted a knighthood at the behest of Tony Blair. 
 
The sequel to Brendon's bestselling Eminent Edwardians, Eminent Elizabethans is written in the same witty, ironic and irreverent style and reveals how each one played out a major theme in the new Elizabethan medley. Each portrait vividly and vitally captured through pungent anecdote, piquant quotation and mordant commentary. In short, these brilliant miniatures are as entertaining as they are illuminating. 
 
'Excellent' Guardian 
'Entirely refreshing' Daily Mail 
'A delight' Daily Express

A delight for connoisseurs of irreverence  (4 stars)

The book abounds with funny stories…there are three or four juicy details on every page (4 stars)

Excellent… By bringing a real historian’s discipline to the task, Brendon has unearthed lots of new material, including the first logged double entendre by Margaret “will this gun jerk me off?” Thatcher -

He possesses a sharp eye for illuminating detail and for his subjects’ contradictions… Often he is as funny as he is viperfish... If there is plenty of acidity here, there is also fairness

Entirely refreshing… Steers well clear of reverence… It’s all merrily contentious stuff – and Brendon wears his mask of criticism well

Brendon’s great skill lies not just in telling funny stories, but in puncturing his subjects’ vision of themselves

The spirit of our age, as captured in the lives of four prominent figures

Brendon is faced with an excess of material and his challenge is to select from the sea of online and biographical information just enough detail to give us the quintessence of his subjects. An excellent writer, he manages more than this, giving the reader not simply a taste of each figure but their full flavor… His genius is to resurrect the anecdote… A relentless routine of gags, related in Brendon’s rapid, incisive prose (5 stars)

Readers of this book will find it compulsively readable and often hilarious, and most will emerge refreshed from the experience

Brendon possesses a sharp eye for illuminating detail and his subjects’ contradictions

The author seeks out the funniest anecdotes and weaves them together with his own observational wit… A welcome addition to the trilogy

A very enjoyable read about four of the most controversial figures of our time

Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling Eminent Edwardians and The Dark Valley, and, most recently, the highly acclaimed The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles, Mick Jagger - four figures who have illuminated our age. 
 
·Margaret Thatcher – the first female Prime Minister, who dedicated herself with messianic zeal to breaking the mould of post-war British politics 
 
·Rupert Murdoch – the billionaire media mogul whose empire, built on an ethical void, has polluted the channels of communication from London to Sydney, from New York to New Guinea 
 
·Prince Charles – the royal dilettante whose erratic exploits shook the throne and put his own succession to it at risk 
 
·Mick Jagger – lead singer of the Rolling Stones, who embodied the sixties counter-culture of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll yet aspired to be a gentleman and accepted a knighthood at the behest of Tony Blair. 
 
A sequel to Brendon’s bestselling Eminent Edwardians, Eminent Elizabethans is written in the same witty, ironic and irreverent style and reveals how each one played out a major theme in the new Elizabethan medley. Each is vividly and vitally depicted through pungent anecdote, piquant quotation and mordant commentary. In short, these brilliant miniatures are as entertaining as they are illuminating.

Portrait of an Eccentric Victorian

Hawker Of Morwenstow

'A beautifully written and vastly entertaining book' - Guardian

So readable that we put down the book wishing for more

Piers Brendon's well-researched Hawker of Morwenstow has unearthed the real man: an extraordinary mixture of genius and fatuity, of mountebank and quirky saint... Dr Brendon comes from Cornwall himself, and his book vividly recaptures the rural poverty and squalor of the mid-nineteenth century

Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling Eminent Edwardians; The Windsors; The Dark Valley; the highly acclaimed The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and, most recently, Eminent Elizabethans. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

This illuminating biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-75) unravels fully the famous Cornish parson-poet's rich personality. Drawing on a mass of unpublished material, Piers Brendon re-creates one of the most bizarre of Victorian lives, revealing the mixture of truth, over-simplification and falsehood in the legend which has built up around him. 
 
The popular account depicts Hawker as a youth of wild high spirits who delighted in hoaxes and practical jokes. As an Oxford undergraduate he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and married his rich 41-year-old godmother. In 1834 he became vicar of Morwenstow and spent the rest of his life in his desolate country parish on the storm-swept coast of north Cornwall. He was a charitable, hard-working Anglo-Catholic but, owing to the remoteness of his position and lack of sympathy from his parishioners, his true genius became warped and he succumbed to wayward eccentricity. 
 
His dress was, to say the least, unorthodox, and he became obsessed with antiquarian lore, lending a haunting reality to the arcane superstitions which he cultivated. He entertained no doubt whatever about the active agency of demons and angels, ghosts and brownies. He talked to birds, invited his nine cats into church and excommunicated one of them when it caught a mouse on Sunday. Out of the timbers of wrecked ships he built a hut, a forbidding sanctuary perched on the high cliff-edge, where he invoked mystic visions and composed romantic poetry. 
 
Piers Brendon here rescues Hawker from legend, and his fascinating book substitutes character for caricature. An even more interesting and idiosyncratic Hawker emerges, scarred and moulded by the stark isolation of his hostile seaboard benefice, a man of remarkable insight and compassion, who submitted in strange ways to his calling, and who, it turns out, proves to have been a true prophet in his yearning exclamation: 'what a life mine would be if it were all written and published in a book.'

Churchill

'Excellent This book - neither hagiography nor critique, just a portra it, warts, wit and all - is a refreshing antidote to the vast tomes on Churchill. ' Guardian

Piers Brendon is the author of a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the bestselling Eminent Edwardians, and, most recently, The Dark Valley, a hugely acclaimed history of the 1930s. He also writes for television and contributes regularly to the national press. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

This astute biography brilliantly captures, in one volume, the full range of Winston Churchill's astonishing career. perhaps the greatest political figure of modern times, Churchill's achievement extended well beyond his emblematic role in the Second World War. Piers Brendon brings great wit and dozens of pungent anecdotes to this penetrating account, illuminating the 'monstrous compound' of courage and egotism, rudeness and humour, brutality and compassion that was Winston Churchill. What emerges from these pages is one of the most fascinating and colourful figures of the twentieth century. To rescue Churchill from being buried under millions of words Piers Brendon has written a brief but brilliant profile of the colossus.

The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire

A brilliant, definitive and unique account of the eclipse of the British Empire.

This is a huge and hugely impressive book, mighty in scale as its subject, elegantly written and rigorous in its research

Magnificent...a narrative masterpiece. The settings are exotic, the cast of thousands full of the most eccentric, egotistical, paranoid, swashbuckling players you are likely to meet in any history

A provocative, marvellously readable account

Brilliant... A masterpiece of historical narrative.  No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon's research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one

In recent years the British Empire has been the subject of fresh scrutiny... Now Piers Brendon brings his own sharp eye to the debate... This he does superbly: with brio and panache and, often, a mordant wit...This is a real achievement and an important one

The conquest of one quarter of the world's surface was, as Piers Brendon shows in disturbingly entertaining fashion, a story of massacre, famine, rape, torture and loot on a grand scale....Brendon with an acute eye for detail and the tragic-comic bon mot, serves up a veritable gorefest in which all sides slake their lusts

Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling Eminent Edwardians, Eminent Elizabethans and The Dark Valley. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the earth's surface was painted red on the map. Yet no empire (except the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. 
 
Within a generation this mighty structure collapsed, often amid bloodshed, leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of an empire, the Commonwealth, overshadowed by Imperial America. It left a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife. 
 
Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is popular history at its scholarly best.

Four figures who defined their age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell

Eminent Edwardians

A dazzling study of four figures who flourished in - and defined - the early years of the twentieth century.

Dr Piers Brendon is a courageous and independent man, and this book is notable not only for its own merits, which are considerable, but as a sign of liberation for future biographical writers.  The message is this.  Biographies have been getting longer, and can, without loss, with positive gain, become shorter- The book leaves one with two hopes.  One, that Brendon will write more like it, two, that other biographers will start examining his model.'

Piers Brendon's brilliant pen portraits of four famous figures of the Edwardian age- Here in sharp focus is all you ever wanted to know about them.  Hilarious and sometimes not a little alarming.'

Piers Brendon is the author of a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, and The Windsors, Hawker of Morwenstow and, most recently, The Dark Valley, a hugely acclaimed history of the 1930s, which are all available in Pimlico. He also writes for television and contributes regularly to the national press. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

In his account of four characters, each of whose importance was global, each of them, in their different ways, 'monsters', Piers Brendon writes wittily, sharply and succinctly - and brilliantly illuminates an age. His cast is as follows: Lord Northcliffe, the creator of modern journalism; Arthur Balfour, at the centre of the British political stage for half a century, and inspirer of the Balfour Declaration which changed the face of the Middle East; Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Suffragettes, whose personal gentility contrasted so oddly with her violent activities; and Baden-Powell, the Boy Scout who never really grew up, but who created a movement that spread to almost every country in the world. Piers Brendon maintains that the Edwardian era has been obfuscated by huge biographies. With four shafts of superb irony he penetrates the mists.

The Dark Valley

A worldwide survey of the 1930s - popular history of breathtaking scholarship and scope.

A fantastic, sweeping history of the 1930s… Brendon is a superb writer, taking an exceptionally complex, dense topic and building a compelling narrative.

The best history book I've read since Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy... Wonderful and enthralling

Brilliant, cinematic, utterly illuminating... No other historical account I know can rival this... Masterly

A delight to read, a literary triumph sparkling with moments of real humour and compassion

Piers Brendon's long book has such brilliance and narrative power, and contains so much fascinating detail, that reading it has all the excitement of novel

Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling Eminent Edwardians, the highly-acclaimed The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and, most recently, Eminent Elizabethans. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark, dishonest decade - child of one world war and parent of the next - that determined the course of the twentieth century. 
 
Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, The Dark Valley brings the 1930's back to life through meticulous scholarship. 
 
Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-Tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then.

Piers Brendon

The Uncrowned King

'After my death', George V said of his eldest son and heir, 'the boy will ruin himself in 12 months'. From the death of his father in 1936 to the constitutional crisis provoked by his proposal to the then-married American socialite Wallis Simpson and his subsequent abdication, Edward VIII reigned for less than year. In choosing the woman he loved over his royal birthright, Edward fulfilled his father's prophecy and instigated the monarchy's most significant upheaval of the twentieth century. Retitled 'Duke of Windsor' and essentially exiled, Edward has remained a controversial figure ever since. Through his correspondence with, amongst other confidants, Winston Churchill, Piers Brendon traces Edward's tumultuous life in this superb, pacey biography.

Piers Brendon

Books by Piers Brendon

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