Life of Sir Walter Ralegh

He was soldier and poet, explorer and courtier, a man who seemed to live several lives at once. Sir Walter Ralegh embodied the restless energy of the Elizabethan age, when England was reaching outward across the globe and inward into the depths of human thought. From the battlefields of Spain to the rainforests of Guiana, from the glittering court of Queen Elizabeth to the damp cells of the Tower of London, Ralegh's life traced an extraordinary arc across the political, intellectual, and cultural landscape of his era. His charisma was legendary, his ambitions vast, his fall catastrophic. Louise Creighton captures this protean figure with sympathy and precision, showing how one man came to represent the dazzling variety of Tudor intellectual life before the starker times that followed.