Voyages and Discoveries

Oct 10, 2024 8:30 PM

Author:Richard Hakluyt,Jack Beeching

Renaissance diplomat and part-time spy, William Hakluyt was also England's first serious geographer, gathering together a wealth of accounts about the wide-ranging travels and discoveries of the sixteenth-century English. One of the epics of this great period of expansion, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation describes, in the words of the explorers themselves, an astonishing era in which the English grew rapidly aware of the sheer size and strangeness of their world. Mingling accounts of the journeys of renowned adventurers such as Drake and Frobisher with descriptions by other explorers and traders to reveal a nation beginning to dominate the seas, Hakluyt's great work was originally intended principally to assist navigation and trade. It also presents one of the first and greatest modern portraits of the globe.

Reviews

The Classical World is a more epic epic than any toga-clad celluloid epic to date... Mr Lane Fox's brilliant book, where soldiers, poets and orators fight for attention in a story that is never cluttered and always stimulating.

—— The Economist

witty, ferociously learned, enormously well read

—— Mary Beard, The Independent

an ambitious and exhilarating volume...The Classical World is so replete with insight and anecdote that I would love to see it in every school library.

—— Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

we are in the hands of an author who knows that an epic can only be driven by big characters such as Pericles, Demosthenes, Philip, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar and Cleopatra...Here lies the author's mastery, matching a lifelong familiarity with his subject to the basic needs of a newly arrived apprentice

—— Nigel Spivey, FT

[Robertson's] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not reached

—— Blair Worden , Literary Review

The writer who got closest to the human truth about our long-serving senior royals

—— The Times

This immense book is part masterpiece, part sheer exhaustion. The masterpiece part lies chiefly in its breathtaking invention

—— Jan Morris , The Times

Everywhere he goes, Mak is quietly ruthless in unmasking the acts of forgetting, selective amnesia, myth-making and historical obfuscation that persist...Mak is a truly cosmopolitan chronicler of shame and self-deceptions

—— David Goldblatt , Independent

His genius as a historian is his instinct for human stories... At moments in this monumental work... Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had

—— Simon Kuper , Financial Times

How eloquently Mak rails against the alliance of consumerism and bureaucracy! ... He has a great eye for telling detail... Only a powerful, humane and serious mind could give coherence to mass detail which, however arresting piece by piece, would otherwise soon become wearying... as much a journey around Geert Mak's head as it is a journey around Europe

—— Guardian

Fascinating

—— David V Barrett , Independent

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