As the seventeenth century opens, a band of venturers forms the Honourable Company of Merchants trading from England to the East Indies. In France, the siege of La Rochelle ends with the massacre of thirty thousand men, women and children. Almost two centuries later, in 1788, John Lempriere published his classical dictionary. This much is fact. Lawrence Norfolk tells us how the first two events led, inescapably, to the third.
This amazing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery and multinational financial conspiracies, and leads a motley cast of scholars and eccentrics, drunk aristocrats and whores, assassins and octogenarian pirates through two centuries and three continents to the brink of French Revolution.
John Lempriere reluctantly enters this world as an introverted scholar, obsessed by the myths of antiquity. At the end of this astonishing story he understands that it takes far more than learning to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.
- ISBN10 1856190536
- ISBN13 9781856190534
- Publish Date 26 August 1991
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 August 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 536
- Language English