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Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London, by Nigel Jones
PDF Ebook Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London, by Nigel Jones
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A dazzling history of the Tower of London, one of the world's busiest tourist attractions, and the people who populated it
Castle, royal palace, prison, torture chamber, execution site, zoo, mint, home to the crown jewels, armory, record office, observatory, and the most visited tourist attraction in the UK: The Tower of London has been all these things and more. No building in Britain has been more intimately involved in the island's story than this mighty, brooding stronghold in the very heart of the capital, a place which has stood at the epicenter of dramatic, bloody and frequently cruel events for almost a thousand years.
Now historian Nigel Jones sets this dramatic story firmly in the context of national―and international―events. In a gripping account drawn from primary sources and lavishly illustrated with sixteen pages of stunning photographs, he captures the Tower in its many changing moods and its many diverse functions. Here, for the first time, is a thematic portrayal of the Tower of london not just as an ancient structure, but as a living symbol of the nation of Great Britain.
- Sales Rank: #140496 in Books
- Brand: Brand: St. Martin's Press
- Published on: 2012-10-02
- Released on: 2012-10-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.58" h x 1.52" w x 6.43" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 464 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
Begun by William the Conqueror and finished by Edward I to the general outlines tourists see today, the Tower of London has a 1,000-year history that Jones jauntily presents. A royal fortress, the Tower and its tales reflect struggles for the crown, which was not always safely stored there; indeed, it was smashed flat in a bungled robbery in which Charles II may have connived. Such mysteries echo within the Tower’s thick walls, including Richard III’s likely murder of Edward V, which so fascinates English-history buffs. Jones entertains that audience well. He recounts the Tower’s functions as a zoo, palace, mint, armory, and, most indelibly, as a prison and place of execution. Heads roll throughout Jones’ pages, frequently under the dynasty that endowed the Tower with its most sinister associations, the Tudors. The final moments of recipients of royal wrath during the 1500s––Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, and Jane Grey––dramatically unfold, and when the headsman’s reign wanes, Jones adopts a more amusing subject, escapes from the Tower. This is popular history well arranged and well written. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
“Heads roll throughout Jones' pages, frequently under the dynasty that endowed the Tower with its most sinister associations, the Tudors. . . . This is popular history well arranged and well written.” ―Booklist
“Historian and journalist Jones enlightens and delights in this history of the London Tower. A historian's history that deserves pride of place in every library.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“A marvelous, authoritative, and entertaining history of England, tightly focused and richly detailed.” ―Publishers Weekly
About the Author
NIGEL JONES is a historian, journalist, and biographer, covering subjects ranging from Nazi Germany to the lives of British writers. He has written for the Cambridge Evening News, the Press Association News Agency, and has been an editor on BBC and independent radio, as well as for History Today and BBC History magazines.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Somebody take this man's thesaurus away
By Jonathan A. Turner
There's a great story here. Too bad the author keeps getting in the way.
We start innocuously enough, with a brief chapter on the Tower's construction and first 120-ish years. A straight chronological approach to the subject, you might think. Well, no. Chapter 2, "The Menagerie and the Mint", veers off into two topics that have nothing to do with Chapter 1, Chapter 3, or each other. The main narrative rights itself for a while thereafter, only to founder on the rocks of the Wars of the Roses, where Nigel Jones gets himself thoroughly lost in a welter of Georges, Richards, earls, dukes, battles, betrayals, bishops, archbishops, castles ... Every so often he remembers that he's supposed to be writing about the Tower of London, and rushes back there, but he never stays long.
Some order returns with the Tudors and early Stuarts, but it doesn't last. The latter half of the book is a series of interconnected chapters, organized thematically rather than chronologically, about what Jones clearly regards as the book's raison d'etre: torture, suffering, and death. Finally we return briefly to the timeline, skimming over the last quarter-millennium in a few pages--I suppose because things have been insufficiently lurid of late to keep Jones interested.
That brings us to Tower's second major failing, which is the writing. "Lurid", did I say? By the time of Richard III the prose has gone positively purple. Jones, in his fervor to uphold the traditional portrait of the black-hearted Richard, loses control of his adjectives, his adverbs, and his judgment. Richard's cohorts are "peculiarly nasty". He's a "monster" and a "gangster". He speaks "silkily". (How Jones knows this, I have no idea.) He's "poisonous", "hideous", "unsavoury", "hysterical". Jones's factual conclusions are probably correct, but his febrile tone and ludicrous partisanship weaken his case rather than strengthening it. Everywhere else, for example, he's rightly skeptical about any testimony obtained by torture. When the testimony in question implicates Richard III, however, it's gospel truth!
This risible prose reaches a fever pitch under Henry VIII. Here are some of the rip-snorters that Jones sprays out in the course of a short chapter and a half: capricious, viciously, brutal, indecent, disgusting, repulsive, inhuman, vindictiveness, refined cruelty, wretched, sinister, stickily, gross, cunning, viciously, contemptuously (the last two in one sentence!), thuggish, mercilessly, contemptuous, unforgivable, sadistically, grisly, brutally, horrific, spitting, groveling, abjectly, bizarrely, desperate, naked terror, repulsive, deranged, gibbering, heartless, ruthless, cynically, monstrous (the last THREE in one sentence!), bloated, senescent, dribbling, rotten, desperately, shrieking, sinister, distraught, desperately, ruthless, indescribable, sadistic, excruciating, wretched, agonizing, ignoble, dreadful, gruesome, grasping, despicable, sycophantic, murderous (*ANOTHER* triple!), barbaric, agonizingly, menacingly, notorious, apoplectically, crawling ignominy, treacherous, savage, monster of selfishness. Not including repeats, of which there are many.
The apotheosis of this absurdity comes when Jones dubs Henry " England's Stalin".
Eventually my higher brain functions shut down and I started enjoying _Tower_. There's plenty of: Blood! Betraya! Sex! Juicy bits! Famous people! More blood!! Torture! Treason! Conspiracy! Yet more blood!!! Think of it as a trashy novel. Better yet, imagine it as a TV series--probably on a cable channel, one with a high budget for gory special effects. The chapters are individual episodes, which explains their semi-random arrangement and loose cohesion. I visualize Nigel Jones as the mildly-deranged host, waving his arms around like an overcaffeinated gibbon, fulminating about Henry VIII and lovingly giving a literal blow-by-blow account of each beheading. (Yes, he really does that.)
If you're interested in English history, you may well enjoy _Tower_--possibly as a mildly-guilty pleasure. Whether you'll actually learn much, I don't know.
33 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By Edie
I was excited to order this book and started it the minute I pulled it from the packaging. And then bit by bit I began finding things that just bothered me. Mr. Jones tends to relate how a person of the time felt and how they said things. It was a minor annoyance at first until I hit the chapter "The Princes, The Protector and The Pretenders". Not only does he goes into more detail about Richard III then needed in order to drive home what a bloodthirsty "little" king he was, he also threw in sentences containing words such as Buckingham "silkily" said, "greasy" Lovell, Catesby and Ratcliffe...ugh... Oh and how Thomas More related that Edward V basically said that he hoped his uncle wouldn't kill him. Where in the history books does THAT statement appear? Only in Thomas More's material found after his death, that was written during the Tudor era. I'm not one of those who blindly believes that Richard had nothing to do with the death of his nephews but no proof has been given that he DID or that he ordered it OR that Henry VII didn't order it. Could Richard have done it? Yes! But don't state it as FACT.
And then the absolute killer for me was this: "Katherine herself, 'beautiful and godly to behold', was dressed in white satin with her dark hair hanging lose down her back..." So he's talking about Katherine of Aragon...who had RED hair. OR possibly golden red. She did NOT have dark hair. SO what else is going to be incorrect if something so well known is incorrect? I have no idea. I stopped reading the book and it goes into my "give away" pile.
All in all this is probably a nice read for someone wanting a REAL broad overview of the Tower and the chance to relate some juicy stories about it...with unnecessary embellishments.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Entertaining but mistitled
By Erin B. Denniston
I bought this book the day I visited the Tower complex for the first time last week. I was so fascinated by the buildings and their history that I wanted to know more. That is NOT what this book is about. This is a history of England that uses the Tower as a kind of linchpin to tell the stories of the times and the people. Which is not a bad device. But I wanted to know more about the structures: their construction, little known facts, how they evolved over time, stories about the builders, etc. It's not that I didn't enjoy the book. But it told the history of England I'm already familiar with and didn't tell me much about what I wanted to know. So before you buy, decide what you're craving to discover and then make a decision whether to purchase THIS book versus another.
Still looking for a good book on the history of the Tower of London complex...
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