Description
Book SynopsisThe masterpiece of Britain’s leading Renaissance scholar. Winner of the Time-Life Silver Pen Award and The Royal Society of Literature Award.
Trade Review‘This magnificent book is the product of a lifetime’s scholarship by someone with a quite irrepressible curiosity and prodigious breadth of reading…together with the enviable gift of writing clearly and beautifully.’ TLS
‘This study deserves to stand alongside Braudel’s classic account of the Mediterranean in the time of Philip II. Hale is as generous as he is knowledgeable; his life’s work has culminated in a meticulous masterpiece.’ Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times
‘John Hale has produced a vast and enthralling mosaic. Only someone who had devoted a lifetime to studying history, literature and the art of the 15th- and 16th-century could draw so effortlessly on what seems a limitless range of texts and illustrations…His curiosity never fails, his learning constantly surprises, and the wit and energy of his style never flags…Extraordinary.’ Anthony Grafton, LRB
