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The Elizabethans | A.N. Wilson | Review by The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, the establishment of the Virginia colony, the formation of the East India Company: the older generation of historians celebrated the Elizabethan age for laying the foundations of the ‘British Empire’—a phrase, Wilson reminds us, that was coined by Elizabeth’s astrologer, John Dee. But historians never stand outside their own time. Where once Sir John Hawkins was a brave seadog, now he is the reviled father of the Atlantic slave trade. Where once Edmund Spenser was the poet of fairyland, now he is the author of a political treatise advocating genocide in Ireland.
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