Coronation of the British monarch on Christmas Day, possibly in imitation of the Byzantine emperors, and John's was on Ascension Day. Elizabeth I consulted her astrologer, John Dee, before deciding on an auspicious date. The coronations of Charles II in 1661 and Anne in 1702 were on St George's Day, the feast of the patron saint of England. Under the Hanoverian monarchs in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was deemed appropriate to extend the waiting period to several months, following a period of mourning for the previous monarch and to allow time for preparation of the ceremony. In the case of every monarch
Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography even perfunctory. Long before I reached the end of what is a very long short book, I was at a loss to know why it had been written." He added, "There is a bit of marvelling and revelling here and there, but it is as routine as everything else in this book, which reads like the work of a tired man." Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography is Christopher Hitchens's contribution to the "Books That Changed the World" series. Hitchens, a great admirer of Thomas Paine, covers the history of Paine's 1791