The masque had a brief but splendid life as the dominant mode of entertainment at the early Stuart court. Extravagant multi-media happenings, court masques were filled with arcane allegorical references and frequently commented on political issues of the day. This selection, the most substantial available, brings together eighteen masques, tracing the evolution of the genre from Jonson's early masques for King James I to Davenant's 1640 masque for Charles I, performed just before the outbreak of the English Civil War. Together, these works offer fascinating insights into the culture and...

It was the greatest scandal of the Jacobean age. In 1616, Frances Howard and her husband the Earl of Somerset were found guilty of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Frances Howard was branded a lewd woman, a wife, a witch, a murderess and a whore, and has gone down in history as the model of female villainy. But has she been misjudged? In an examination of both the historical evidence and cultural representations of Howard, David Lindley presents important new insights into the case against her. In doing so he challenges the assumptions that have constructed Howard as a deviant woman,...

For more than a century physicists have hoped that they were closing in on the Holy Grail of modern science: a unified theory that would make sense of the entire physical world, from the subnuclear realm of quarks and gluons to the very moment of creation of the universe. The End of Physics is a history of the attempts to find such a "theory of everything"; a forceful argument it will never be found; and a warning that the compromises necessary to produce a final theory may well undermine the rules of good science.At the heart of Lindley's story is the rise of the particle physicists...

Few revolutions in science have been more far-reaching--but less understood--than the quantum revolution in physics. Everyday experience cannot prepare us for the sub-atomic world, where quantum effects become all-important. Here, particles can look like waves, and vice versa; electrons seem to lose their identity and instead take on a shifting, unpredictable appearance that depends on how they are being observed; and a single photon may sometimes behave as if it could be in two places at once. In the world of quantum mechanics, uncertainty and ambiguity become not just unavoidable, but...