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

‘Highly entertaining. A picaresque romp through the literature and cultural landscape of the seventeenth century’

Daily Mail

‘Wonderful, consistently interesting, extraordinary’

Evening Standard

‘Entertaining, ambitious, wonderful turns of phrase. An array of fascinating characters … could hardly be bettered. Intelligently binds together the art and politics of mid-17th-century England’

Financial Times

‘A scrumptious banquet. There appears to be no end to Stubbs’s knowledge. Literary criticism, political manouevring, military affairs, domestic narratives from unremembered lives, the goings-on at court - everything is handled with adroit assurance in prose that bubbles with wit and good humour’

Spectator

‘Marvellously incisive, learned and moving … innumerable terrific passages. There is plenty of substance in Stubb’s book, and plenty of wit, too’

Sunday Times