Search results for ""Author John Adamson""

A magnificent new study of the political crisis that produced the overthrow of King Charles I, and came to engulf all three Stuart kingdoms - England, Scotland, and Ireland - in war during the 1640s.John Adamson's book traces the careers and fortunes of the small group of English noblemen who risked their lives and fortunes to challenge the king's attempt to create an authoritarian monarchy in the Stuart kingdoms during the 1630s.What was achieved in 1641 astonished - and alarmed - contemporaries: the trial and execution of the king's most powerful minister; a new, and sometimes violent, phase of religious reformation; the drastic curbing of the powers of the Crown; the planning of a major Anglo-Scottish military intervention in the Thirty Years' War.The threat of war was rarely absent and the resort to armed force come to seem a viable, perhaps even the only, means of resolving the conflicts within the Stuart realms.

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The book begins by the North Sea. It is a late summer's afternoon, and a bright sun has dispersed the greyness of the day. Two Englishmen are enjoying a swim off the Essex coast when all at once both have the feeling that they are back at the French seaside. They find themselves starting to tell each other of their youthful experiences of living in France. The adventures they narrate follow one after another like waves rolling onto the shore. Clive, coming from London, had found himself spending a year deep in the French countryside within sight of the western Pyrenees; John, hailing from Devon, had ended up living for a while in the City of Light within sight of the Folies Bergere. Outsiders though they were, they momentarily became part of French society, their adventures fuelled by the culinary delights of their adopted land. They tell their tales with humour and relish as they recall their initiation into the French way of life of decades ago - and how it shaped their own.

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The value of inventories in charting how houses were arranged, furnished and used is now widely appreciated. Typically, the listings and valuations were occasioned by the death of an owner and the consequent need to deal with testamentary dispositions. That was not always so. The inventory for Castlecomer House, Co. Kilkenny, for example, was drawn up to make a claim following the house's devastation in the 1798 uprising. Mostly hitherto unpublished, the inventories chosen give new-found insights into the lifestyle and taste of some of the foremost families of the day. Above stairs, the inventories show the evolving collecting habits and tastes of eighteenth-century patrons across Ireland and how the interiors of great town and country houses were arranged or responded to new materials and new ideas. The meticulous recording of the contents of the kitchen and scullery likewise sheds light on life below stairs. Itemized equipment required for the brewhouse, dairy, stables, garden and farmyard reflects the at times significant scale of the communities the houses supported and the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency at some of the demesnes. A comprehensive index facilitates access to the myriad items forming the inventories, while the books listed at three of the houses are tentatively identified in separate appendices. A foreword together with short preambles to the inventories set the households in their historical context. Illustrated with contemporary engravings of the houses and with portraits of the owners of the time, the inventories will appeal to country-house visitors, historians of interiors, patronage, collecting and material culture as well as to scholars, curators, collectors, creative designers, film directors, bibliographers, lexicographers and novelists. The eighteenth century is the period onto which the Knight of Glin directed his penetrating gaze as art historian. The book is dedicated to his memory.

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