This sumptuous catalogue provides an overview of French art circa 1500, a dynamic, transitional period when the country, resurgent after the dislocations of the Hundred Years' War, invaded Italy and all media flourished. What followed was the emergence of a unique art: the fusion of the Italian Renaissance with northern European Gothic styles. Outstanding examples of exquisite and revolutionary works are featured, including paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, tapestries, and metalwork. Exciting new research brings to life court artists Jean Fouquet, Jean Bourdichon, Michel Colombe, Jean Poyer, and Jean Hey (The Master of Moulins), all of whose creations were used by kings and queens to assert power and prestige. Also detailed are the organization of workshops and the development of the influential art market in Paris and patronage in the Loire Valley.

Kensington Palace is now most famous as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the palace's glory days came between 1714 and 1760, during the reigns of George I and II . In the eighteenth century, this palace was a world of skulduggery, intrigue, politicking, etiquette, wigs, and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like switchblades and unusual people were kept as curiosities. Lucy Worsley's The Courtiers charts the trajectory of the fantastically quarrelsome Hanovers and the last great gasp of British court life. Structured around the paintings of courtiers and servants that line the walls of the King's Staircase of Kensington Palace-paintings you can see at the palace today-The Courtiers goes behind closed doors to meet a pushy young painter, a maid of honor with a secret marriage, a vice chamberlain with many vices, a bedchamber woman with a violent husband, two aging royal mistresses, and many more. The result is an indelible portrait of court life leading up to the famous reign of George III , and a feast for both Anglophiles and lovers of history and royalty.

In this follow-up to her bestselling Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what goes on behind the closed door of the queen's boudoir. Impeccably reseached, filled with page-turning romance, passion, and scandal, Sex with the Queen explores the scintillating sexual lives of some of our most beloved and infamous female rulers, including the notorious Catherine the Great, the passionately foolish Marie Antoinette, the destructively willful Tsarina Alexandra, and the bastion of virtue, Queen Victoria - mother of nine children.