David Starkey Books

Each week of Donald Trump's presidency is captured in a poignant haiku, reflecting the tumultuous events with a blend of dismay and dark humor. Starkey's work serves as a satirical chronicle, memorializing the outrages and absurdities of the era through memorable and impactful lines, offering readers both a critique and a unique poetic perspective on a controversial figure.

Tour the sites of Rome with David Starkey's garrulous new guide to the Italian Renaissance in fifty pocket-sized poems.

From rock magazine articles to government reports, David Starkey’s novel, Poor Ghost, is an unrelenting rollercoaster that follows one of America’s most storied rock band.

WINNER OF THE FUTURECYCLE POETRY BOOK PRIZEIn David Starkey’s latest collection of poems, the world has gone awry. A mudslide destroys part of one city, floods transform another, good people die. Ex-wives decapitate photos of their ex-husbands, saints sit in Starbucks with arrows poking from their torsos, and neighbors prey on one another while “Christmas lights…hang all year from unpainted eaves.” And yet even amidst the turmoil and tragedy, moments of redemption emerge: “the surf soughs and the wind, / redolent of salt and eucalyptus, whispers of grace,” as the world continues working its magic on us, “like a lazy scrawl of cirrus across the horizon— / dawn morphing into brighter day.”

A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel, by the poet-laureate of Santa Barbara, ranges through philosophy, art and history--both global and domestic --to skillfully chronicle the darkness that is our current age and condition, and the pinpricks of light that may show us the way out.

Covers the basics of a college writing course in a concise, student-friendly format. Anything inessential to the business of college writing has been excluded. Each chapter concentrates on a crucial element of composing an academic essay and is capable of being read in a single sitting.

No one in history had a more eventful career in matrimony than Henry VIII. His marriages were daring and tumultuous and made instant legends of six very different women.

An exploration of the British monarchy from the retreat of the Romans up until the modern day. This compendium volume of two earlier books is fully revised and updated. The monarchy is one of Britain's longest surviving institutions - as well as one of its most tumultuous and revered. David Starkey looks at the monarchy as a whole, charting its history from Roman times, to the Wars of the Roses, the chaos of the Civil War, the fall of Charles I and Cromwell's emergence as Lord Protector - all the way up until the Victorian era when Britain's monarchs came face-to-face with modernity. This collection of biographies of Britain's kings and queens provides an in-depth examination of what the British monarchy has meant, what it means now and what it will continue to mean.

Henry VIII was almost never alone. He was surrounded, twenty four hours a day, by the small group of intimates and personal attendants who made up the staff of his Privy Chamber. They organised his daily life, kept him amused and acted as the landline between the king and the formal machinery of government. These men, intermarried, interbred and close knit even in their mutual feuding, were supremely well placed to rig politics and patronage for their own benefit. Their influence was important and sometimes decisive: factions in the Privy Chamber destroyed Anne Boleyn, they frustrated the Catholic reaction of the 1540s, and, by doctoring Henry's will, prepared the way for the full blooded Protestantism of his son's reign. The Reign of Henry VIII is not so much a book about Henry VIII. It is about the great game of politics over which he presided.

A woman in a man's world, confident of her destiny to reign, intensely intelligent, passionately sexual yet (she said) a virgin, Elizabeth was to become England's most successful ruler. Finding her way through the labyrinthine plots that surrounded the court, she had to live by her wits, surrounded by betrayal and suspicion, not knowing who to trust with her desire to be queen, or her desire to be a lover...