Davies, Norman – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Sat, 16 Sep 2023 12:29:40 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Davies, Norman – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 George II https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/george-ii/ Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/george-ii/ From the celebrated historian and author of Europe: A History, a new life of George II

George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover, came to Britain for the first time when he was thirty-one. He had a terrible relationship with his father, George I, which was later paralleled by his relationship to his own son. He was short-tempered and uncultivated, but in his twenty-three-year reign he presided over a great flourishing in his adoptive country – economic, military and cultural – all described with characteristic wit and elegance by Norman Davies. (George II so admired the Hallelujah chorus in Handel’s Messiah that he stood while it was being performed – as modern audiences still do.) Much of his attention remained in Hanover and on continental politics, as a result of which he was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle, at Dettingen in 1744.

]]> Vanished Kingdoms https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/vanished-kingdoms/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/vanished-kingdoms/ From Norman Davies, the acclaimed author of Europe: A History, comes the magical history of Europe’s lost realms, selected as a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Independent, Guardian and Financial Times.

Europe’s history is littered with kingdoms, duchies, empires and republics which have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age. What happened to the once-great Mediterranean ‘Empire of Aragon’? Where did the half-forgotten kingdoms of Burgundy go? Which current nations will one day become a distant memory too? This original and enthralling book peers through the cracks of history to discover the stories of lost realms across the centuries.

‘Dazzling, provocative and brilliant’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘A luminous account … there are few better ways of understanding the multilayered splendours and horrors of Europe’s past than through the pages of this wise, humane and unfailingly engaging book’ John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

‘Vanished Kingdoms is great history and also great art. It is written with verve, passion and profound empathy’ David Marquand, New Statesman, Books of the Year

‘A magnificent achievement. Brocaded with scholarship, the book is unlikely ever to be equalled’ Ian Thomson, Independent

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