Anna Keay

Simon Mayo's Books Of The Year

We may be a little late to this book, but, we want to shout about it nonetheless!

Anna Keay joins Simon and Matt for a deep dive into The Restless Republic, when for eleven years, Britain had no king.

In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution, but it's not a time in history that we are taught about, certainly in the UK.

Anna's book takes as its guides the people who lived through these years of restlessness. Among them is Anna Trapnel, the daughter of a Deptford shipwright whose visions transfixed the nation. John Bradshaw, the Cheshire lawyer who found himself trying the King. Marchamont Nedham, the irrepressible newspaper man and puppet master of propaganda. Gerrard Winstanley, who strove for a Utopia of common ownership where no one went hungry. William Petty, the precocious scientist whose mapping of Ireland prefaced the dispossession of tens of thousands. And the indomitable Countess of Derby who defended to the last the final Royalist stronghold on the Isle of Man.

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