Book Review: King John and the Road to Magna Carta
/800 years ago, King John "Lackland" sealed Magna Carta and unwittingly laid the foundation for some of Western law; a new book takes a fresh look at this much-maligned figure
Read MoreBook Review: A Great and Terrible King
/He established Parliament, hammered the Scots, expelled the Jews, and inspired centuries of biographers - England's King Edward I gets a lively new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Killers of the King
/Under the direction of Oliver Cromwell, dozens of men deliberated to execute the captive King Charles I, and when Charles II came to power a decade later, those men were suddenly in the gravest danger. A fascinating new book tells their stories.
Read MoreBook Review: Rebellion
/Veteran popularizer Peter Ackroyd gives his readers a rattling good yarn of kings, decapitations, interregnums, frivolities, and depositions
Read MoreBook Review: The Wars of the Roses
/The protracted dynastic struggle of York and Lancaster is the dramatic subject of the new book by historian Dan Jones
Read MoreClassics Reissued: Richard III
/The discovery of Richard III's skeleton in 2012 has flushed a number of books about the legendary dark monarch back into print - and none more welcome than this snappy volume by veteran biographer Desmond Seward
Read MoreBook Review: Pagan Britain
/For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived and thrived and worshipped in what is now the British Isles, raising massive monuments and scorching the very ground in the long ages before the arrival of Christianity; a magisterial new history recounts as much as we now know about those lost centuries
Read MoreBook Review: Henry VIII - The Life and Rule of England's Nero
/England's 'bluff king Hal' is put under the microscope in a scathing new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Tudors
/Our reigning master of vigorous popular history takes on the most vigorous, popular English dynasty of them all
Read MoreBook Review: Shakespeare's Prince
/An exhaustive - and immensely enjoyable - line-by-line examination of Shakespeare's final play
Read MoreBook Review: A Great and Monstrous Thing
/"Houses, Churches, mix'd together - Streets, unpleasant in all Weather" - so wrote the poet about resolute, dissolute London, whose 18th century excesses are the subject of a grand new book
Read MoreBook Review: Counting One's Blessings
/The official biographer of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother now gives us that most unlikely of things: a collection of her life-long correspondence
Read MoreBook Review: Shakespeare's Common Prayers
/The words of Shakespeare have become a common literary language - but whose words did HE know? Why, the words of Thomas Cranmer, of course.
Read MoreBook Review: The Men Who Would Be King
/Elizabeth I's radical decision to remain unmarried gave hope to every aspiring suitor in the Western world - a new reprint marches us quickly through the usual suspects.
Read MoreBook Review: Conquest
/For thirty hard-fought years, the King of England was also the King of France - new in US bookstores is a thrilling account of those years
Read MoreBook Review: The Last Pre-Raphaelite
/A big new biography of Edward Burne-Jones, whose vivid and dreamlike artwork caught the sentimentality of his time and shaped it to immortal perfection.
Read MoreBook Review: Henry VIII
/A masterful new biography takes Henry VIII down a peg or two
Read MoreBook Review: Reprobates
/They were for King, country, and courtesans - not necessarily in that order! They were the Cavaliers, and a spirited new book tells their story.
Read MoreBook Review: Mary I
/A quietly stunning new biography of England's infamous "Bloody Mary"
Read MoreBook Review: She-Wolves
/An immensely enjoyable new book looks at four women who ruled England in the centuries before Queen Elizabeth I.
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