Alan Taylor

"From the Pulitzer Prize- winning historian, a brilliant, absorbing study of Jefferson and his campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully crafted history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. Thomas Jefferson shares center stage with his family and fellow planters, all dependent on the labor of enslaved black families. With a declining Virginia yielding to...

"Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americans through the flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. Alan Taylor presents an engaging overview of this new scholarship, showing that American colonization derived from a global expansion of European exploration and commerce that began in the fifteenth century. The English had...

In 1990, Alan Taylor traveled to Arezzo, Italy, to interview one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. That interview evolved into a close friendship between Taylor and Muriel Spark that lasted until her death in 2006. In this intimate, anecdotal, admiring and indiscreet memoir, Taylor charts the course of Spark's life, revealing her as she really was. Once, Spark commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she...

In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from millennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and conquest, and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past,...

"Harry Potter and Sense and Sensibility actor Alan Rickman builds upon his legacy as a world-class actor, a tireless political activist, an avid traveler, and more through his diaries--a twenty-five-year passion project in which Rickman invites readers backstage and into his life. Alan Rickman remains the one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre in the American and British markets, from his breakout role as Die Hard's Hans...

Drawn from new sources, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian presents a gripping narrative that recreates the events that inspired hundreds of slaves to pressure British admirals into becoming liberators by using their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war.

Young Anthony Soprano is growing up in one of the most tumultuous eras in Newark's history, becoming a man just as rival gangsters begin to rise and challenge the all-powerful DiMeo crime family's hold over the increasingly race-torn city. Caught up in the changing times is the uncle he idolizes, Dickie Moltisanti, who struggles to manage both his professional and personal responsibilities, and whose influence over his nephew will help make the impressionable...

Kings from across the continent of Westeros vie for the Iron Throne. As winter approaches, the cruel young Joffrey sits upon the Throne in King's Landing, counseled by his conniving mother Cersei and his uncle Tyrion, who has been appointed the new Hand of the King. But the Lannister hold on power is under assault on many fronts, with two Baratheons donning crowns, and Robb Stark fighting as the King in the North.

Atlantic City, 1921. In a city whose fortunes have soared in the wake of Prohibition, Nucky Thompson is paying a steep price for wielding ultimate power in 'the world's playground'. Though the 1920 election is over, Nucky finds himself the target of a federal investigation for vote tampering, and an insurrection by those he counted among his closest allies.