Imagination is an amazing thing.
It can take you to the top of the highest mountain, or down to the bottom of the
The past is a foreign country
- this is your guide. We think of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603) as a golden age. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past & walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? & if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism & famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer reveals a country in which life expectancy is in the early thirties, people still starve to death & Catholics are persecuted for their faith. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language, some of the most magnificent architecture, & sees Elizabeth's subjects settle in America & circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world.