Saturday 19 March 2016

This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World

Independent, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World by Jerry Brotton, book review "With Henry VIII's break with Rome and then (in 1570) Elizabeth's excommunication as a "heretic" by Pope Pius V, England found itself shunned as a rogue state by Catholic Europe. It needed friends with clout in strategic locations. Around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, only the lands of Islam could supply them. Thus the stage was set for an extraordinary half-century of adventures, deals, conspiracies and misunderstandings: a little-known story that Brotton chronicles with scholarship, assurance, and not a little charm."