Diane Stanley

A biography of the Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, well known for his work on the Sistine Chapel in Rome's St. Peter's Cathedral.

A biography of the tsar who began the transformation of Russia into a modern state in the late seventeenth-early eighteenth centuries.

Cleopatra was not the renowned beauty of legend-her strength lay in her intelligence, courage, and charm, and she would need all three in her short and perilous reign. She became Queen of Egypt at eighteen and by twenty had been driven from her throne. But she raised an army and won the support of the great Julius Caesar, who helped her return to rule. In the note on sources, the authors indicate that much of the information about Cleopatra has been...

Follows the life of the strong-willed queen who ruled England in the time of Shakespeare and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Charles Dickens is one of the world's greatest and best loved writers. To read Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, or Nicholas Nickleby is to be drawn into a society that still seems fresh and real today: nineteenth-century London with its extraordinary extremes of wealth, progress, poverty, and despair. Dickens captures it all in plots that are by turns wildly comical, wonderfully melodramatic, and tragic to the point of tears. In his writing...

"With tensions rising between the kingdoms of Westria and Austlind, Molly and Tobias accompany King Alaric to Cortova, where he hopes to form an alliance with the powerful King Gonzalo--an alliance that would be sealed by Alaric's marriage to Gonzalo's daughter, the beautiful princess Elizabetta"--

Forty years before the boy was born, a horde of bloodthirsty barbarians thundered out of the west and conquered his native land. They had succeeded because his people, ever at war with one another, had not fought together to defend their cities. In time the boy was destined to become the very leader that was needed, a man with the courage and vision to unite his people and face the most fearsome and brilliant warrior of the age. The time was the twelfth...