In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 - Rilegato

Uglow, Jenny

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571269524 ISBN 13: 9780571269525

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2014

Riassunto

"The sharply-observed characters and constant pricks of humour make this book seem almost as if Jane Austen had written a history of her own times." (Lucy Worsley The Times). We know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic wars - but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank or a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers - how did the war touch their lives? Every part of Britain felt the long twenty years of war against the French: one in five families had people in the services and over 300,000 men died. As the years passed, so the bullish, flamboyant figure of Napoleon - Boney, the bogeyman - came to dominate so much that the whole long conflict was given his name. Jenny Uglow, the prize-winning author of The Lunar Men and Nature's Engraver, follows the gripping back-and-forth of the first global war, but turns the news upside down, seeing how it reached the people. Illustrated by the satires of Gillray, Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Scott and Byron with others lost in the crowd, In These Times delves into the archives to tell the moving story of how people lived and loved and sang and wrote, struggling through hard times and opening new horizons that would change their country for a century ahead.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

'(A) magnificent, richly illustrated book ... Jenny Uglow is a uniquely gifted historian. Her style is supremely elegant and often amusingly bathetic, her researches exhaustive but lightly worn ... No page is without its intriguing anecdote. (Sue Gaisford Financial Times)

Detailed but not trivial, rich yet never heavy, the sharply-observed characters and constant pricks of humour make this book seem almost as if Jane Austen had written a history of her own times. (Lucy Worsley The Times)

As crowded and bustling as a Gillray drawing ... at its impressive best, it has the dense feel of Turner's Battle of Trafalgar. (Nicholas Shakespeare Daily Telegraph)

Jenny Uglow has cast her net wide and captured a crucial era in our island story and of European history, that is, despite its wrist-breaking bulk, pretty well unputdownable. (Nigel Jones The Spectator)

Few can match her skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character with a swift and glittering line of description. And so it is here ... In These Times brims with life. (Miranda Seymour Sunday Times)

Uglow's excavation of a thousand forgotten incidents and observations, beautifully organised around a timeline of world-shaking events, is erudite and imagination-stretching. Her prose makes most academic historical writing look constipated, and her generous regard for ordinary people is unmatched. (Vic Gatrell Book of the Week, Guardian)

In These Times is readably entertaining. Uglow has a great gift for historical narrative - storytelling without ever dumbing down or cutting corners. (Susan Elkin Independent on Sunday)

In These Times is a remarkable book written by an award winning historian at the peak of her powers. Uglow explains the complex politics of the era with elegant ease and has an eye for detail which is worth of the biographer of the engraver, Thomas Bewick. (Rachel Trethewey The Independent)

Descrizione del libro:

In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 is Jenny Uglow's beautifully observed history of the home front during the Napoleonic Wars from one of Britain's greatest historians.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571269524
• ISBN 13: 9780571269525
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 752