A time of exceptional creativity, wealth creation, and political expansion, the Elizabethan age was also more remarkable than any other for the Technicolor personalities of its leading participants. Apart from the complex character of the Virgin Queen herself, A. N. Wilson€™s The Elizabethans follows the stories of Francis Drake, a privateer who not only defeated the Spanish Armada but also circumnavigated the globe with a drunken, mutinous crew and without reliable navigational instruments; political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham; and Renaissance literary geniuses from Sir Philip Sidney to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Most crucially, this was the age when modern Britain was born and established independence from mainland Europe€”both in its resistance to Spanish and French incursions and in its declaration of religious liberty from the pope€”and laid the foundations for the explosion of British imperial power and A political and cultural surveyor of England’s Elizabethan era, the prolific Wilson, author of three dozen novels and histories, brings erudition and judiciousness to this ever-popular topic. Whether plumbing the mind of the Virgin Queen herself, characterizing her courtiers, or capturing England’s social ferment through the prelates, poets, and buccaneers of the period, Wilson exudes energy that matches the excitement and anxiety Elizabethans felt about their times. How individuals responded to precarious exigencies, such as Elizabeth’s succession and adjurations to adhere to Elizabeth’s official church, elicits Wilson’s incisive imaginings of Elizabethan mentalities in a superstitious and violent age. Hence he dwells on the magus John Dee, recounts draconian methods and instances of justice, and addresses harsh English policies in Ireland, stridently supported by the anti-Irish Edmund Spenser. Yet Spenser also wrote the allegorical Faerie Queene and so embodies for Wilson the difficulties contemporary readers confront in understanding complexities within the Elizabethan mind-set. Viewed through the likes of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, the elements that awe or appall moderns become manifest in Wilson’s supple and fluent synthesis. --Gilbert Taylor “A scholarly, thorough and yet highly approachable overview of the life and times of Queen Elizabeth I... The Elizabethans is written in a style that moves easily along yet does not shy away from decisive analysis and interpretation.” ― Arthur L. Schwarz, Washington Independent Review of Books A. N. Wilson is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist. He lives in North London.