ARCADIA: THE DREAM OF PERFECTION/ RENAISSANCE ENGLAND (PB)

Through 16th- and 17th-century England, the changes of an approaching modernity accelerated. The new mercantile, individualist world increasingly clashed with the communal and chivalric ideals of the old. The great families who had once balanced the power of the crown became increasingly marginalised. To tell this story from the 1520s to the 1640s, Adam Nicolson takes a single great family, the Earls of Pembroke and follows their high and glamorous trajectory across three generations of change, nostalgia, ambition, resistance and war.