Four centuries ago, and thirteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men--led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric, and a government spy--arrived in Virginia aboard a fleet of three ships and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America.

Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources, and manuscript collections scattered across the...

From the bestselling author of 'The Queen's Conjuror', comes the story of Nicholas Culpeper - legendary rebel, radical, Puritan, and author of the great 'Herbal'. This is a powerful history of medicine's first freedom fighter set in London during Britain's age of revolution.

In the mid-17th century, England was visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: a civil war which saw levels of slaughter not matched until the Somme, famine in a succession of failed harvests that reduced peasants to 'anatomies', epidemics to rival the Black Death in their enormity, and infant mortality...

A spellbinding portrait of Queen Elizabeth's conjuror - the great philosopher, scientist and magician, Dr John Dee (1527-1608) and a history of Renaissance science that could well be the next 'Longitude'.

John Dee was one of the most influential philosophers of the Elizabethan Age. A close confidant of Queen Elizabeth, he helped to introduce mathematics to England, promoted the idea of maths as the basis of science, anticipated the invention of the telescope, charted the New World, and created one of the most magnificent libraries in Europe. At the height of his fame, Dee was poised...