Böcker av William Poole

Four separate journeys. One common thread. The explorers of the Drakefall are through with the shadowy conspiracy that haunts them, but is the Ebon Vault done with them?An assassin seeks answers about her heritage. A thug craves redemption- or revenge. A witch wants to find meaning in a murdered god. And a boy- half a man, half a blacksmith, half a mage- wants to find himself. Sometimes going forward will take you halfway around the world, sometimes it will take you back home, but it never takes you where you expect.

When the Tadpole's foster father goes missing, he tries to live out a normal life. But unfortunately for this young man, his life is going to be anything but ordinary. Can he live up to the expectations his foster father placed on him, or the expectations he places on himself? First he will have to survive an epic cross-country journey through his homeland, the fiercely independent Protectorate, before hints of his future path may be found. But not alone- along the way he will be joined by several companions of dubious pasts and uncertain futures, much like himself.

A Voyage into Tartary (London, 1689), by a writer calling himself 'Heliogenes De L'Epy', is a hitherto unedited seventeenth-century utopia, purportedly written by a French traveller, but in all likelihood the work of a hidden English author. The text has often been mistaken over the centuries as a genuine piece of travel writing, but in reality A Voyage into Tartary is fictional throughout, and its latter half consists of a utopia of unusually radical parameters. Heliogenes recounts how he travelled far into the lands of 'Tartary' (a region chiefly overlapping with the modern Russian and Chinese lands), where he encounters an isolated but advanced civilisation living in communism and worshipping the Sun. These 'Heliopolitans' are the descendants of Greek philosophers who travelled east in the aftermath of the death of Alexander the Great, and who preserve to this day the ancient Greek language. These Sun-worshipping philosophers, however, turn out to be borderline atheists, paying homage to the Sun merely as the most powerful visible material thing, but who admit neither a Creator God in the manner of monotheistic, providential religions, nor indeed any higher non-material principle at all. They regard Christianity, when it is explained to them by Heliogenes, as obviously spurious, shelving Heliogenes' copy of the New Testament among the books of 'mythology' in their state library. As Heliogenes complains, 'All the while that I convers'd with them, I could not find that they had any Notion of God after our manner.' A Voyage into Tartary is a remarkable and almost unknown text of the period, influenced by recent writing in both English and French, including Frenchutopian texts such as Denis Veiras's The History of the Sevarites (1675-) and Gabriel de Foigny's ¿¿La Terre Australe connue (1676). But its achievement is distinctive, as are its opening sections of pseudo-travel in Greek, Turkish, and Persian lands. It deserves to be more widely known, and to that end this editio princeps provides a fully annotated text of the only edition, prefaced by a substantial critical and textual introduction, including a discussion of the true identity of the hidden author.

To which is appended a facsimile Reprint of Dr. George Buchanan's Oration on the Moral and Political Evil of Slavery, delivered at a public meeting of the Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Baltimore, July 4, 1791.

William Poole recounts Milton's life as England's self-elected national poet and explains how the greatest poem of the English language came to be written. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole explores how Milton's life and preoccupations inform the poem itself-its structure, content, and meaning.

Shakespeares works do not embody any doctrine or set of beliefs, as his critics have long been tempted to suggest, but they do stage encounters with certain kinds of thinking ethical, political, epistemological, even metaphysical that still concern us nowadays.