After Edward

'I think it's queer. And it's about to get queerer...' Edward II wanders on to the empty stage, bloodied and confused. He has no idea where he is, or how he got here, but he does have an ominous feeling that something is wrong. As that feeling grows, so too does the threat on the other side of the auditorium doors. Edward finds himself locked inside the theatre with some rather anarchic fellow inmates: Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk and Quentin Crisp. As they set about unravelling what has happened, only one thing is certain: everything is not as it seems... A daring new play written specifically for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in response to Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, After Edward welcomes us into a chaotic world of pride and shame, with moments of elation, outrageous humour and heart-breaking tenderness. Oh, and Maggie Thatcher. In a play that reminds us of the power of theatre to provoke recognition and reflection, this is Edward II as you've never seen him before.

An authoritative life of Edward the Confessor, the monarch whose death sparked the invasion of 1066 One of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, Edward the Confessor regained the throne for the House of Wessex and is the only English monarch to have been canonized. Often cast as a reluctant ruler, easily manipulated by his in-laws, he has been blamed for causing the invasion of 1066—the last successful conquest of England by a foreign power. Tom Licence navigates the contemporary webs of political deceit to present a strikingly different Edward. He was a compassionate man and conscientious ruler, whose reign marked an interval of peace and prosperity between periods of strife. More than any monarch before, he exploited the mystique of royalty to capture the hearts of his subjects. This compelling biography provides a much-needed reassessment of Edward’s reign—calling into doubt the legitimacy of his successors and rewriting the ending of Anglo-Saxon England.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (Biography) A New York Times bestseller, this “epic and elegant” biography (Wall Street Journal) profoundly recasts our understanding of the Vietnam War. Praised as a “superb scholarly achievement” (Foreign Policy), The Road Not Taken confirms Max Boot’s role as a “master chronicler” (Washington Times) of American military affairs. Through dozens of interviews and never-before-seen documents, Boot rescues Edward Lansdale (1908–1987) from historical ignominy to “restore a sense of proportion” to this “political Svengali, or ‘Lawrence of Asia’ ”(The New Yorker). Boot demonstrates how Lansdale, the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, pioneered a “hearts and minds” diplomacy, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam. Bringing a tragic complexity to Lansdale and a nuanced analysis to his visionary foreign policy, Boot suggests Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With contemporary reverberations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, The Road Not Taken is a “judicious and absorbing” (New York Times Book Review) biography of lasting historical consequence.

The image of King Arthur's Round Table is well-known. An archaeological find at Windsor Castle sheds new light on the idea of a round table as a gathering, in the shape of the 'House of the Round Table' which Edward III ordered to be constructed in 1344.