Biography & Memoirs
3 total works
From the biographer of Henry VIII, an appraisal of his youngest daughter, the woman who would rule England during its golden age. She inherited from her father his intelligence, his physical energy, and his ebullient personality. But was she herself a great queen, or did she merely preside over a great era in English history. Ridley argues that Elizabeth's actions during her reign of England, and its military and cultural supremacy were determined by the fact that her parents were Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
Maximilian and Juarez recounts one of the great tragicomedies of the nineteenth century, the attempt by Napoleon III to establish Archduke Maximilian of Austria as the Emperor of Mexico. The celebrated author Jasper Ridley provides a colourful narrative of this ill-starred undertaking that pitted liberals against conservatives and the New World against the Old, ending with the execution of Maximilian, the insanity of his wife Charlotte, and the emergence of the United States as a world power. This strange episode is at once a central part of American history and a tragic tale of human ambition and cultural misunderstanding.