Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 10

1558-1608: a half-century that reshaped the world. Here is the Elizabethan age in full fury and flourish, the Spanish Armada breaking against English shore, the Dutch fighting for their lives against imperial Spain, Renaissance princes plotting and dying, explorers pushing into the unknown. Horne has assembled the great historians of an earlier age to narrate these pivotal decades in their own vigorous prose. This is not the sanitized textbook history of today but history as it was written by scholars who felt its stakes immediately: partisan, certain, alive with conviction. The French Wars of Religion, the rise of the Dutch Republic, the Elizabethan settlement, the first colonial ventures that would birth an empire - all rendered in the grand Victorian manner, with drama and sweep and moral certainty. For readers who want to feel history as people once understood it: not a settled account but a living argument about what mattered and why.