Search

The early years of the rakehell monarch whose dalliances and indiscretions are an effective mirror of the morality of his time.

The personality of the eloquent and unpredictable British monarch is the central focus of a detailed and well-research biography.

Christopher Fitz-Simon was born into an extraordinary Irish family, with Daniel O'Connell on one side and Orangemen on the other, and his childhood coincided with the Second World War - or, as it was known in the southern Irish state, the Emergency. Eleven Houses is a crystalline memoir of his family's odd progress through those odd years, an account by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Christopher's father was an officer in the British army, serving in the middle east when war broke out, and the family home in these years was in fact eleven different houses, in all four provinces of Ireland. Drawing on his extraordinarily vivid recall of the places and feelings of those years, Christopher Fitz-Simon tells a story of growing up that is also, in effect, a story of various hidden Irelands during the twilit years of the war. Funny, moving and sharp, it is a childhood memoir like no other.

Set in the context of Haddenham project's innovative landscape surveys, this book covers four sites excavated at Haddenham, providing insights into death and ritual in a changing prehistoric environment. Moving on to later periods, it reveals how Iron Age and Romano-British communities adapted to the wetland environment.