Best Selling Books by Antonia Fraser

Antonia Fraser, a popular historian, has delved into archives across Europe to unravel the true story of the plot by fanatical Roman Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I at the opening of Parliament in 1605.

Award-winning historian Antonia Fraser brilliantly portrays a courageous and compassionate woman who refused to be curbed by the personal and political constraints of her time. Caroline Norton dazzled nineteenth-century society with her vivacity, her intelligence, her poetry, and in her role as an artist''s muse. After her marriage in 1828 to the MP George Norton, she continued to attract friends and admirers to her salon in Westminster, which included the young Disraeli. Most prominent among her admirers was the widowed Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Racked with jealousy, George Norton took the Prime Minister to court, suing him for damages on account of his ''Criminal Conversation'' (adultery) with Caroline. A dramatic trial followed. Despite the unexpected and sensational result—acquittal—Norton was still able to legally deny Caroline access to her three children, all under seven. He also claimed her income as an author for himself, since the copyrights of a married woman belonged to her husband. Yet Caroline refused to despair. Beset by the personal cruelties perpetrated by her husband and a society whose rules were set against her, she chose to fight, not surrender. She channeled her energies in an area of much-needed reform: the rights of a married woman and specifically those of a mother. Over the next few years she campaigned tirelessly, achieving her first landmark victory with the Infant Custody Act of 1839. Provisions which are now taken for granted, such as the right of a mother to have access to her own children, owe much to Caroline, who was determined to secure justice for women at all levels of society from the privileged to the dispossessed.

The letters in this anthology are grouped according to the emotions they convey: passions, ecstasies and total love, fears, worries, and jealousies. The lovers or would-be loved range from the famous and expected, Heloise and Abelard, Jane Carlyle, Vanessa to Swift, Byron, Zelda Fitzgerald, Napoleon, Henry VIII, Goethe, Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mozart to lesser known but equally poignant correspondents.

In England, November 5 is Guy Fawkes Day, when fireworks displays commemorate the shocking moment in 1605 when government authorities uncovered a secret plan to blow up the House of Parliament--and King James I along with it. A group of English Catholics, seeking to unseat the king and reintroduce Catholicism as the state religion, daringly placed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in a cellar under the Palace of Westminster. Their aim was to ignite the gunpowder at the opening of the Parliamentary session. Though the charismatic Catholic, Robert Catesby, was the group''s leader, it was the devout Guy Fawkes who emerged as its most famous member, as he was the one who was captured and who revealed under torture the names of his fellow plotters. In the aftermath of their arrests, conditions grew worse for English Catholics, as legal penalties against them were stiffened and public sentiment became rabidly intolerant. In a narrative that reads like a gripping detective story, Antonia Fraser has untangled the web of religion, politics, and personalities that surrounded that fateful night of November 5. And, in examining the lengths to which individuals will go for their faith, she finds in this long-ago event a reflection of the religion-inspired terrorism that has produced gunpowder plots of our own time.

400 years ago this November the most ambitious and extraordinary plot ever conceived in this country came close to success: the attempt by Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators to destroy in a single, annihilating blast the entire British ruling class and royal family. This book draws on the expertise of different writers to bring to life the immense implications of the Plot and the strange way they have echoed down to us over four centuries in what remains the quintessential English festival. Pauline Croft writes about the amazing plot itself and the anxious, unstable world of Jacobean Britain, Antonia Fraser imagines a world in which the plot had succeeded, Justin Champion dramatizes the national emergency that followed the plot''s discovery and its savage anti-Catholicism, David Cressy traces how Bonfire Night has been celebrated since its inception as a holiday, Mike Jay focuses on the most famous and enduring rituals held each year at Lewes and Brenda Buchanan offers a wonderful history of fireworks in Britain.

From the outset, Caroline Lamb had a rebellious nature. From childhood she grew increasingly troublesome, experimenting with sedatives like laudanum, and she had a special governess to control her. She also had a merciless wit and talent for mimicry. She spoke French and German fluently, knew Greek and Latin, and sketched impressive portraits. As the niece of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, she was already well connected, and her courtly skills resulted in her marriage to the Hon. William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne) at the age on nineteen. For a few years they enjoyed a happy marriage, despite Lamb''s siblings and mother-in-law detesting her and referring to her as ''the little beast''. In 1812 Caroline embarked on a well-publicised affair with the poet Lord Byron - he was 24, she 26. Her phrase ''mad, bad and dangerous to know'' became his lasting epitaph. When he broke things off, Caroline made increasingly public attempts to reunite. Her obsession came to define much of her later life, as well as influencing her own writing - most notably the Gothic novel Glenarvon - and Byron''s. Antonia Fraser''s vividly compelling biography animates the life of ''a free spirit'' who was far more than mad, bad and dangerous to know.

In the eighteenth century, the Catholics of England lacked many basic freedoms under the law: they could not serve in political office, buy or inherit land, or be married by the rites of their own religion. So virulent was the sentiment against Catholics that, in 1780, violent riots erupted in London—incited by the anti-Papist Lord George Gordon—in response to the Act for Relief that had been passed to loosen some of these restrictions. The Gordon Riots marked a crucial turning point in the fight for Catholic emancipation. Over the next fifty years, factions battled to reform the laws of the land. Kings George III and George IV refused to address the “Catholic Question,” even when pressed by their prime ministers. But in 1829, through the dogged work of charismatic Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell and the support of the great Duke of Wellington, the watershed Roman Catholic Relief Act finally passed, opening the door to the radical transformation of the Victorian age. Gripping, spirited, and incisive, The King and the Catholics is character-driven narrative history at its best, reflecting the dire consequences of state-sanctioned oppression—and showing how sustained political action can triumph over injustice.

When King James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England in 1603 he had ruled his native land almost as long as had Queen Elizabeth. He showed both vision and determination in pursuing his major political goals: a united Britain, and a foreign policy based on peace rather than bellicose chauvinism. Of course, there was a darker side: in the face of growing Parliamentary opposition, he would need all his celebrated wisdom to prevent open conflict. This book is a sympathetic portrait of a worthy first king of Great Britain.

Antonia Fraser''s Perilous Question is a dazzling re-creation of the tempestuous two-year period in Britain''s history leading up to the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, a narrative which at times reads like a political thriller. The era, beginning with the accession of William IV, is evoked in the novels of Trollope and Thackeray, and described by the young Charles Dickens as a cub reporter. It is lit with notable characters. The reforming heroes are the Whig aristocrats led by Lord Grey, members of the richest and most landed cabinet in history yet determined to bring liberty, which would whittle away their own power, to the country. The all-too-conservative opposition was headed by the Duke of Wellington, supported by the intransigent Queen Adelaide, with hereditary memories of the French Revolution. Finally, there were revolutionaries, like William Cobbett, the author of Rural Rides, the radical tailor Francis Place, and Thomas Attwood of Birmingham, the charismatic orator. The contest often grew violent. There were urban riots put down by soldiers and agricultural riots led by the mythical Captain Swing. The underlying grievance was the fate of the many disfranchised people. They were ignored by a medieval system of electoral representation that gave, for example, no votes to those who lived in the new industrial cities of Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham, while allocating two parliamentary representatives to a village long since fallen into the sea and, most notoriously, Old Sarum, a green mound in a field. Lord John Russell, a Whig minister, said long afterwards that it was the only period when he genuinely felt popular revolution threatened the country. The Duke of Wellington declared intractably in November 1830 that "The beginning of reform is the beginning of revolution." So it seemed that disaster must fall on the British Parliament, or the monarchy, or both. The question was: Could a rotten system reform itself in time? On June 7, 1832, the date of the extremely reluctant royal assent by William IV to the Great Reform Bill, it did. These events led to a total change in the way Britain was governed, and set the stage for its growth as the world''s most successful industrial power; admired, among other things, for its traditions of good governance -- a two-year revolution that Antonia Fraser brings to vivid dramatic life.

A collection of mysteries for Jemima Shore in such places as a Caribbean graveyard, a Corfu tourist resort, a leafy London square, and an English university high table.

Nine ebooks from the bestselling historian Antonia Fraser, shedding light on some of the most fascinating and controversial people and events of European history. MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS Mary, Queen of Scots passed her childhood in France and married the dauphin to become queen of France at the age of sixteen. Widowed less than two years later, she returned to Scotland as queen after an absence of thirteen years. CROMWELL No Englishman has made more impact on the history of his nation than Oliver Cromwell; few have been so persistently maligned in the folklore of history. The central purpose of Antonia Fraser''s book is the recreation of his life and character, freed from the distortions of myth and Royalist propaganda. KING CHARLES II Spanning his life both before and after the Restoration, Antonia Fraser''s lively and fascinating biography captures all the vitality of the man and the expansiveness of the age. THE WEAKER VESSEL An expert on the period, Antonia Fraser brings to life the many and various women she has encountered in her considerable research: governesses, milkmaids, fishwives, nuns, defenders of castles, courtesans, countesses, witches and widows. THE WARRIOR QUEENS Warrior Queens are those women who have both ruled and led in war. It examines how Antonia Fraser''s heroines have held and wrestled the reins of power from their (consistently male) adversaries. THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII The six wives of Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr. They may have been victims of Henry''s obsession with a male heir, but they were not willing victims. THE GUNPOWDER PLOT Dramatically recreating the conditions and motives that surrounded the fateful night of 5 November 1605, she unravels the tangled web of religion and politics that spawned the plot. MARIE ANTOINETTE Antonia Fraser examines her influence over the king, Louis XVI, the accusations and sexual slurs made against her, her patronage of the arts which enhanced French cultural life, her imprisonment, the death threats made against her, her trial and her eventual execution by guillotine in 1793. LOVE AND LOUIS XIV Antonia Fraser brilliantly explores the relationships which existed between the Sun King and the women in his life.

''Love and Louis XIV'' centres around the Sun King and his relationships with numerous women. Divided into five parts, this work brings to life the vast edifice of Louis XIV''s court - the magnificence, artistic splendour, elaborate ritual and in some cases, absurdity and misery.

The acclaimed biographer details the life, reign, and impact of King Charles II of England, revealing him to have been far more serious, sensible, and competent than has been thought

A seventh Jemima Shore mystery story, which finds her researching a television project, Ghosts and Ourselves, and subsequently investigating a murder.

The first collection of short mystery stories by the creator of Jemima Shore, investigator.

Jemima Shore is summoned by the wayward Lady Imogen Swain. She has become increasingly eccentric and threatens to reveal details of her affair with Foreign Secretary Burgo Smith and of the subsequent mysterious disappearance of a young journalist. Entrusting Jemima with her diary is the first step in a sinister series of events leading not only to scandal but also to murder.

A diverse collection of stories of drama and suspense from writers such as Antonia Fraser, Ruth Rendell and Sharyn McCrumb. From cops to private eyes to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations, these stories feature heroines who face danger and solve crimes with panache.