The first accessible, authoritative and complete account of Vasco da Gama's historic and audacious attempt to seize the spice routes and re-conquer the Holy Land. The Last Crusade puts the reader on da Gama's ships in the midst of a perplexing, terrifying, yet exciting new world and in doing so traces the ancestry of antagonism between the world's two dominant faiths, Christianity and Islam.
Nigel Cliff is a historian, biographer and critic. He was educated at Oxford University, where he was awarded a double First in English and the Beddington Prize for English Literature. He has written widely for publications including The Times, The Economist and the New York Times. He is the author of The Shakespeare Riots (Random House, 2007). He lives in London with his wife, the ballerina Viviana Durante, and their son Orlando.
A stirringly epic book...Gama's incident-rich voyage [is a]
thrilling narrative
*Sunday Times*
This excellent book tells the story [of Vasco da Gama] with the
swagger and excitement it deserves
*Spectator*
Lively and ambitious... Cliff has a novelist's gift for depicting
character... He brings sixteenth-century Portugal in all its
splendor and squalor pungently to life
*New York Times, 'Notable Books of the Year' 2011*
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