Antonia Fraser

"Antonia Fraser's memoir of growing up is not only an attempt to recapture the experiences of her Oxford childhood and youth -- in Shakespeare's phrase, to 'call back yesterday, bid time return.' It is also a chronicle of the progress of her love of history since her first discovery of it as a private pleasure when she was a child in the 1930s--her history, as she believed it to be, for the study of history (as her books subsequently attest) has always...

Relates the story of nineteeth-century English poet Caroline Norton, who was denied access to her children by her husband after a sensational trial for adultery, and fought tirelessly for the rights of married women and mothers, resulting in the passage of the Infant Custody Act of 1839.

"In the summer of 1780, mob violence swept through London. Nearly one thousand people were killed, looting was widespread, and torch-bearing protestors marched on the Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street. These were the Gordon Riots: the worst civil disturbance in British history, triggered by an act of Parliament designed to loosen two centuries of systemic oppression of Catholics in the British Isles. While many Londoners saw their homes...

She was the quintessential queen: statuesque, regal, dazzlingly beautiful. Her royal birth gave her claim to the thrones of two nations; her marriage to the young French dauphin promised to place a third glorious crown on her noble head. Instead, Mary Stuart became the victim of her own impulsive heart, scandalizing her world with a foolish passion that would lead to abduction, rape, and even murder. Betrayed by those she most trusted, she would be...

From cover: "Women in 17th-century England-heiresses and dairymaids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress."

Profiles the men and women who have inherited or seized the English crown since 1066 and assesses the political impact of their personalities and characteristics.