Books published by publisher Pimlico

The first full-length biography of one of history’s most notorious femme fatales — Isabella — a much maligned Queen of England.Isabella of France, Edward II’s queen, was a woman much maligned in her day. Today, it is said that her maniacal laughter can be heard on stormy nights at Castle Rising in Norfolk, and that in the ruins of the 14th century church where she is buried, her angry ghost can be glimpsed, clutching the beating heart of her murdered husband. In literature she has fared no better; Christopher Marlowe’s “unnatural Queen, false Isabel” has also been described as “a woman of evil character, a notorious schemer,” and as the “She-Wolf of France.” Tragic, cruel, tormented: how did Isabella acquire such a reputation?Born in 1292, the daughter of Philip IV of France and sister to three future French kings, Isabella was a pawn in the game of international politics. She was married at the age of twelve to Edward II of England, thus beginning a public and private life more turbulent and eventful than any heroine, or anti-heroine, in fiction.Through a long period of civil war, Isabella bore Edward four children but was constantly humiliated by his relationships with male favourites. Although she is known to have lived adulterously with Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, accusations of murder and regicide remain unsubstantiated. Had it not been for her unfaithfulness, history may have immortalized her as a liberator — the saviour who unshackled England from a weak and vicious monarch.

In Battle at Sea, Sir John Keegan applies to maritime warfare the technique that he put to such brilliant effect in his classic of war on land, The Face of Battle. He concentrates on four key conflicts: Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway and the Battle of the Atlantic. He takes us into the very heart of the fighting while providing a remarkable panoramic view of naval warfare through the centuries.

The work of Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) includes the Cenotaph in Whitehall, much of Imperial New Delhi and especially his masterpiece, Viceroy's House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), Queen Mary's dolls' house and Hampstead Garden Suburb. But his greatest heritage is the traditional Edwardian country house, an architectural style he made his own, using local materials and often working with Gertrude Jekyll who planted the gardens for his family homes. This is a full biography of a witty, complex personality, a man who had little formal education, who loved jokes and hated growing up. It is also a portrait of an extraordinary marriage. His wife, Emily, fell in love with Krishnamurti, 21 years her junior and believed to be the reincarnation of a god, and she thereafter spent her time and her husband's money promoting Theosophy, a Hindu-inspired cult. Lutyens's failure to find a common language with Emily possibly drove him to achieve the remarkable communication through the language of architecture which characterises his best work.

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.