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A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow (Hardcover, 2009)

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A Gambling Man is a glorious romp of a book, filled with glittering anecdotes about Britain at its most glamorous and easy-going best. ... A double biography of both a man and his age which gleams with a rare kind of intimacy. Here is popular history at its compelling best. (Kathryn Hughes Mail on Sunday) Our finest biographer of the working life, Uglow excels in writing about the public, professional self. Like many a good card game, A Gambling Man is intense, involved, absorbing. (Frances Wilson Sunday Times 2009-09-27) An absorbing and memorable book ... If the king is at the centre of her extensively researched book, it ranges far beyond him. Its achievement is to bring together the analytical insights of recent studies of the politics of the period with the re-creation of mood and atmosphere.

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Charles II was thirty when he crossed the Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after long years of Cromwell's rule. But there was no going back, no way he could 'restore' the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father's beheading. 'Honour' was now a word tossed around in duels. 'Providence' could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. Exactly ten years later Charles would stand again on the shore at Dover, laying the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV. The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles, the 'slippery sovereign', layed odds and took but the king were on display, his true intentions lay hidden. A Gambling Man is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these ten vital years - and a portrait of a vibrant, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.