Tag: Percy

Hotspur Sir Henry Percy & the Myth of Chivalry


Free Download Hotspur: Sir Henry Percy & the Myth of Chivalry by John Sadler
English | July 7th, 2023 | ISBN: 1399003887 | 256 pages | True EPUB | 17.70 MB
On 21 July 1403 Sir Henry Percy – better known as Hotspur – led a rebel army out at Shrewsbury to face the forces of the king Henry IV. The battle was both bloody and decisive. Hotspur was shot down by an arrow and killed. Posthumously he was declared a traitor and his lands forfeited to the crown. This was an ignominious end to the brilliant career of one of the most famous medieval noblemen, a remarkable soldier, diplomat and courtier who played a leading role in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. How did he earn his extraordinary reputation, and why did Shakespeare portray him as a fearsomely brave but flawed hero who, despite a traitor’s death, remained the mirror of chivalry? These are questions John Sadler seeks to answer in the first full biography of this legendary figure to be published for over twenty years.

(more…)

Percy Bysshe Shelley Poet and Revolutionary (Revolutionary Lives)


Free Download Jacqueline Mulhallen, "Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (Revolutionary Lives)"
English | 2015 | pages: 193 | ISBN: 074533461X, 0745334628 | PDF | 9,0 mb
Today, Percy Bysshe Shelley is an emblem of the Romantic movement and one of the lights of English culture-his poems memorized by schoolchildren, his life honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. That wasn’t always the case, however. In his own day, Shelley was widely loathed, seen as an immoral atheist and a traitor to his class for his revolutionary politics. His work was damned as well, receiving scathing reviews rooted as much in disapproval of his politics and personal life as in the verse itself. That’s the Shelley that Jacqueline Mulhallen brings to life in this accessible, political biography: the Shelley who, though writing when the working class was in its infancy, clearly grasped-and wanted to change-the system of oppression under which laborers and women lived. The revolutionary Shelley, Mulhallen shows, has long served as an inspiration to figures from Karl Marx to W. B. Yeats to the poets and writers of today, and for popular movements like the Chartists and the suffragettes, even as his public image and poetry became part of the establishment.

(more…)