This is only slightly a question, but I adore your book on Elizabethan England - I gave it 5 stars on this site which is rare for me to give nonfiction - so I thought it worth a shot. I was wondering: what sparked your love of that time period? I read both your book and saw the three-part series, and I really thought that you seemed to especially care about all parts of the Elizabethan Era.

Ian Mortimer Thanks for the question. To be honest, my interest in the Elizabethan period is no greater or less than my interest in the late medieval or the Restoration periods, or even the Regency. I suppose the sixteenth century is a bit of a high-water mark in our last thousand years, in that French had given way to the English language, and Catholicism to English Protestantism, and England's attention had shifted from rivalries with France to a wider outlook across the whole world and, indeed, towards the heavens. More great architecture survives from the period too, and more documentation and more portraits, and of course there's the creativity of its poets and playwrights, whose words speak directly to us. It has an earthiness and yet it was fascinatingly open to men of talent and education, it wasn't just the old brigade of the nobility and gentry holding court. So, yes, there's plenty to love - but in truth I am equally keen on the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I tend to lose interest around the 1830s. Everything since then is really 'just the other day' - all that has happened of note since then is either based in technology (in the widest sense of the word) or extremist politics, or is just a continuation of what they started with the Industrial Revolution. All our modern preoccupations were cultural viewpoints by 1832 - political reform, democracy, relationships between the sexes, sexual identity, care for the poor, the social importance of scientific exploration, the wrongness of racism, the iniquities of slavery, the social responsibilities of government, the necessaity of quantification of the economy, and planning for the future, etc etc. As for what 'sparked' my fascination with the Elizabethan period - simply the fact that its legacy is all around me, in our culture, language, identity - everywhere, in everyone, everyday. If you can understand the root of things, you have a much better chance of understanding how society came to be as it is, and thus why things are as they are.
Hope that helps.
all the best,
Ian

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