The London Restoration

The secrets that might save a nation could shatter a marriage. Madly in love, Diana Foyle and Brent Somerville married in London as the bombs of World War II dropped on their beloved city. Without time for a honeymoon, the couple spent the next four years apart. Diana, an architectural historian, took a top-secret intelligence post at Bletchley Park. Brent, a professor of theology at King’s College, believed his wife was working for the Foreign Office as a translator when he was injured in an attack on the European front. Now that the war is over, the Somervilles’ long-anticipated reunion is strained by everything they cannot speak of. Diana’s extensive knowledge of London’s churches could help bring down a Russian agent named Eternity. She’s eager to help MI6 thwart Communist efforts to start a new war, but because of the Official Secrets Act, Diana can’t tell Brent the truth about her work. Determined to save their marriage and rebuild the city they call home, Diana and Brent’s love is put to the ultimate test as they navigate the rubble of war and the ruins of broken trust.

This book explores the literary and cultural rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666.

Elucidates early modern attitudes toward women's public display. This title presents a cultural study that draws on a range of literary and non-literary texts from 1650-1700 to revisit the sites where women appeared most prominently: the playhouse, the park, and the New Exchange (a shopping arcade in the Strand).

In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the “exact proportions” of sea monsters—all were created by members of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London’s emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque architecture such as St Paul’s Cathedral. Matthew C. Hunter brings to life this archive of experimental-philosophical visualization and the deft cunning that was required to manage such difficult research. Offering an innovative approach to the scientific image-making of the time, he demonstrates how the Restoration project of synthesizing experimental images into scientific knowledge, as practiced by Royal Society leaders Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, might be called “wicked intelligence.” Hunter uses episodes involving specific visual practices—for instance, concocting a lethal amalgam of wax, steel, and sulfuric acid to produce an active model of a comet—to explore how Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues devised representational modes that aided their experiments. Ultimately, Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of suspicion in Enlightenment England. The first book to use the physical evidence of Royal Society experiments to produce forensic evaluations of how scientific knowledge was generated, Wicked Intelligence rethinks the parameters of visual art, experimental philosophy, and architecture at the cusp of Britain’s imperial power and artistic efflorescence.

Restoration is a dazzling romp through 17th-century England. The main character Robert Merivel not only embodies the contradictions of his era, but ours as well. He is trapped between the longing for wealth and power and the realization that the pursuit of these trappings can leave one's life rather empty.

A tantalizing and thrilling history of London at the time of King Charles II, from the acclaimed co-author of The King's Revenge and The King's Bed. During the reign of Charles II, London was a city in flux. After years of civil war and political turmoil, England's capital became the center for major advances in the sciences, the theatre, architecture, trade and ship-building that paved the way for the creation of the British Empire. At the heart of this activity was the King, whose return to power from exile in 1660 lit the fuse for an explosion in activity in all spheres of city life. London flourished, its wealth, vibrancy and success due to many figures famous today including Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, and John Dryden — and others whom history has overlooked until now. Throughout the quarter-century Charles was on the throne, London suffered several serious reverses: the plague in 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666, and severe defeat in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which brought about notable economic decline. But thanks to the genius and resilience of the people of London, and the occasionally wavering stewardship of the King, the city rose from the ashes to become the economic capital of Europe. The King's City tells the gripping story of a city that defined a nation and birthed modern Britain — and how the vision of great individuals helped to build the richly diverse place we know today.

What is it about old pine panelling layered with flaking paint that enchants the eye and tugs at the heart? The soft shine of wooden boards, worn and gappy. Sunlight shafting through an open door out to an unevenly flagged yard where a clay pipe might turn up alongside a Thames oyster shell or a pottery shard. Blue-and-and white export ware; the molten lustre of mahogany or worn silver; the curiosity of tricorn hat boxes or a fragment of Spitalfields silk; portraits whose owners might once have lived here. Would they have believed that these houses would stand 250 years later? Time has imbued all these things with unforgettable patina not only in museums, but even more in old Georgian houses still lived in and loved, repaired, and regenerated. The majority of these extraordinary dwellings began as ordinary terrace houses, built to a pattern, often in pairs or small groups. Clusters exist in the East End of London: in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Mile End. They are mostly Grade II-listed, and their owners put up with the bone-curdling cold of winter howling through gaps, with mending and colour-matching, patching and piecing. Not just put up with-- they embrace it. And among them are some unrepentantly furnished with 20th- and 21st-century modern, finding poetic harmony across the centuries.

One was the mother who bore him; three were women who adored him; one was the sister he slept with; one was his abused and sodomized wife; one was his legitimate daughter; one was the fruit of his incest; another was his friend Shelley's wife, who avoided his bed and invented science fiction instead. Nine women; one poet named George Gordon, Lord Byron – mad, bad and very very dangerous to know. The most flamboyant of the Romantics, he wrote literary bestsellers, he was a satirist of genius, he embodied the Romantic love of liberty (the Greeks revere him as a national hero), he was the prototype of the modern celebrity – and he treated women (and these women in particular) abominably. In BYRON'S WOMEN, Alex Larman tells their extraordinary, moving and often shocking stories. In so doing, he creates a scurrilous 'anti-biography' of one of England's greatest poets, whose life he views – to deeply unflattering effect – through the prism of the nine damaged woman's lives.