Reprobates

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAVALIERS BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR 'Dashing and daring, colourful, subtle and provocative . . . stuffed almost to bursting-point with character and incident. Feasting on poems, diaries, plays, masques, letters and biographies, Reprobates introduces us to . . . a flamboyant parade of chancers, dreamers, turncoats, heroes, idiots and hedonists who grab the reader's shoulders and force a drink on us as if in some dim-lit, tallow-smoked tavern of the 1630s' Independent