Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre , , was the sister of Francis I, King of France. She was highly-educated and was courted by the future Henry VIII of England. However, at the age of seventeen, she was married by royal decree to the untutored dolt, Charles IV of Alençon. After his death she wed Henry II of Navarre by whom she had a daughter and a son, who died in infancy. The author takes us with Margaret on her perilous journey over the Pyrenees to Spain to attempt to free her brother, Francis, held captive by the Holy Roman Emperor...

Emily Brontë is best known for her only novel, "Wuthering Heights." She was born in Yorkshire, northern England, where her father was an Anglican curate. When Brontë was three years old her mother died of cancer. At the age of six she joined her three sisters briefly at the Clergy Daughters' School, where privations and abuse contributed to the deaths of two of them. Her elder sister, Charlotte, immortalized this terrible place in "Jane Eyre." In 1846 Emily Brontë, under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, published a selection of her poetry...

After the Roman conquest, the Celtic Gauls adopted Roman culture and speech. The Germanic invasions ultimately transformed France into a Catholic feudal society. In this short history, Mary Duclaux traces the emergence of towns, the rise of the French monarchy, the calamitous Hundred Years' War and the Wars of Religion. We meet Joan of Arc, Charles VII, the gallant Henry IV, and the Sun King, Louis XIV, who drove France to the brink of bankruptcy. In the second half of the book Duclaux gives us the...