This book is short, only 230 pages, and could easily have added another 100 without becoming boring. There is a lot about the persecution -and the gruesome public execution -of local Catholics, such as Margaret Clitheroe being crushed to death by stones in 1586. He goes back to Guy Fawkes' youth growing up in a Protestant family in York, a city which was never completely won over by the Reformation. The stories began their publication in January 1840; Guy Fawkes was published in instalments in Bentley's Miscellany until November 1840. We see young Protestant Guy with a great linguistic talent, good looks, and full of life, playing a Nine Men’s Morris with his friends.

Holland states that, according to Guy’s former schoolmaster John Pulleyn, Guy was “highly intelligent and well-read”. She was brought back to life, and the spot where she had lost her head instantly became a fountain that could cure people. Indulge me in some history, as it's pretty easy to get lost in these sections of Holland's book if you don't know the terrain.

In Viviana Radcliffe I have sought to portray the loyal and devout Catholic, such as I conceive the character to have existed at the period. This book is likely the same as “Faith and Treason” with a different subtitle; Fraser’s in-depth account of the 1605 conspiracy.

After having read Antonia Fraser's great book on the Gunpowder Plot, I wanted to read a biography of Guy Fawkes. While today, we may set off fireworks and go to displays, traditionally and in fact right up to my own childhood the day was celebrated with a community bonfire where an effigy of Fawkes himself would be burned.At the end, the reader is left with a deep understanding of the issues that led to the plot, as well as the plot itself. This fresh new biography of Guy’s life removes the layers of complexity that can cloud the British history of this time: an era when fearful Catholics hid in tiny priest holes, government spies were everywhere, and even your closest friends could send you to be hung, drawn and quartered. Though gunpowder did nothing to promote long life, it certainly put power into the hands of those who understood its destructive properties, and Ponting's book becomes a monothematic account of "how gunpowder changed the world" as its use spread and it became more lethal with advances in technology.