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Crowning Glory
As a nation, we like to think we know everything about our Kings and Queens. William I conquered in 1066, Henry VIII had six wives and Queen Victoria was ‘not amused’… But do these ‘pub-quiz facts’ provide a genuine picture of what our monarchs were really like as living, breathing people? As the reader shall find, there is a treasure-trove of wit, wisdom and wonder waiting to be discovered.
Crowning Glory wipes away the cobwebs of fuddy-duddy facts and breathes new life into this surprisingly addictive aspect of history. It challenges our basic understanding of the subject by introducing readers to a colourful cast of characters and revealing little-known insights.
This book reminds us that, behind the formality of the crown, are real human beings. Like you and me, they have known success, failure, sorrow, and laughter. The lives of our kings and queens are so much more vivid than boring, old dates, figures, and facts.
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City of Tears: The Dark History of Paris
If you were standing on the very spot where Joan of Arc was wounded by an arrow, wouldn’t you want to know?
Beneath the brilliance and the grandeur of Paris is a city that few people know. It lingers in the dark shadows of the past, if only you knew where to look.
For 21 centuries, Paris has been the epicenter of countless invasions, occupations, civil wars, sieges, rebellions, assassinations, coups, massacres, executions, epidemics – and, of course, a world-shattering revolution.
In 40 brief stories, City of Tears will guide you through Paris’s astonishingly turbulent history – from the Roman conquest to World War I – and point you to the very sites where momentous events occurred. Along the way, you will meet a parade of personalities: Ragnar Lodbrok, the Templars, Joan of Arc, Catherine de’ Medici, the Sun King, Marie Antoinette, Louis XVII, the two Napoleons, Alfred Dreyfus, and dozens of other fascinating characters who shaped the history of the beautiful city we know today.
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Addicted
Humans are biologically hardwired to alter their mental state, drugs are the pathway, and America is their biggest consumer. From antiquity to modernity, use and prohibition have gone hand in hand. Addicted raises the curtain to expose the lies and fill in the blanks behind America’s failed 50 year war on drugs and makes sense of the quagmire of misinformed laws and policy, blending Miller’s investigative journalism with historical narrative.
In addition, Miller tells the story of nature’s three primary psychotropic plants and the history of government efforts to suppress them: Papaver Somniferum, the opium poppy, the drug of Asian mystery, which provides opium and its derivative alkaloids morphine and heroin; Erythroxylum Coca, which provides the cocaine of all night parties and glamor; and Cannabis Sativa, L., the historical intoxicant of rebellion and counterculture. These plants convert soil, water, nutrients, CO2, and light into complex chemical substances, which can elevate, intoxicate, and even heal.
Addicted unravels the institutional mechanism that fuels the war’s self-perpetuation, its abject failure, and its deplorable byproduct of racial injustice. The stories in Addicted feature a diverse cast of heroes, villains, and bureaucrats as well as all the post-Nixon Presidents who failed in their version of the war.
£3.50