<p><b>''Excellent... Mortimer''s erudition is formidable'' <i>The Times</i></b><br><br><b>A time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behaviour...Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in British history - the Regency, or Georgian England.</b><br><br>This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; Britain''s military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo. It was perhaps the last age of true freedom before the arrival of the stifling world of Victorian morality.<br><br>And like all periods in history, it was an age of many contradictions - where Beethoven''s thundering Fifth Symphony could premier in the same year that saw Jane Austen craft the delicate sensitivities of <i>Persuasion</i>.<br><br>This is history at its most exciting, physical, visceral - the past not as something to be studied but as lived experience. This is Ian Mortimer at the height of his time-travelling prowess.<