Ian Mortimer

Henry V is regarded as the great English hero. With his victory at Agincourt and his rigorous application of justice, he was elevated by Shakespeare into a champion of English nationalism. But does he deserve to be thought of as 'the greatest man who ever ruled England?' Here Ian Mortimer portrays the dramatic events of 1415, offering the fullest, most precise and least romanticised view we have of Henry and what he did.

In a contest of change, which century from the past millennium would come up trumps? Imagine the Black Death took on the female vote in a pub brawl, or the Industrial Revolution faced the Internet in a medieval joust - whose side would you be on? In this hugely entertaining book, celebrated historian Ian Mortimer takes us on a whirlwind tour of Western history, pitting one century against another in his quest to measure change.

King Henry IV survived at least eight plots to dethrone or kill him in the first six years of his reign. Such threats transformed him from hero to murderer, prepared to go to any lengths to save his family and throne. Against all the odds, however, he took a poorly ruled nation, established a new Lancastrian dynasty, and introduced the principle that a king must act in accordance with parliament.

We tend to think about the Middle Ages as a dark and backward time characterised by violence ignorance and superstition. We believe that life was unchanging over the period so if a peasant fell asleep in in the year 1000 and woke up six hundred years later he would return to a world that was instantly recognisable. We hold that change is facilitated by science and technological innovation and that it was the inventions of recent centuries from the steam engine to the Internet that created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating introduction to the Middle Ages people's horizons - their knowledge experience and understanding of the world -- expanded dramatically. All aspects of life - politics and economics religion and the arts - were utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600 in the process laying the foundations on which our modern lives rest. If Ian Mortimer's bestselling Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England revealed what it was like to live in the fourteenth century Medieval Horizons provides the perfect primer to the period as a whole. It looks at the Middle Ages through the prism of a small range of topics - ranging from warfare to religion travel to architecture inequality to a new sense of self - thereby correcting misconceptions and presenting the period as one of the most important eras in our past about which any reader with an interest in history should care.

King Edward III’s life is one of the most extraordinary in all English history. He ordered his uncle to be beheaded, he usurped his father’s throne, and started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years. Dr Ian Mortimer unveils that behind the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man - resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family, and the father of both the English nation and the English people.

What was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a visitor to late sixteenth-century England would ask.

The past is a foreign country: this is your guidebook Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat?

Ian Mortimer shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. He sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking you to the Middle Ages. The result is the most astonishing social history book you are ever likely to read: evolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail, and startling for its portrayal of humanity in an age of violence, exuberance and fear.

If you could travel back in time, the period from 1660 to 1700 would make one of the most exciting destinations in history. It’s the age of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London, the libertine court of Charles II, Christopher Wren, Henry Purcell and Isaac Newton. Ian Mortimer answers the crucial questions that a prospective traveller to seventeenth-century Britain would ask.