"There Is, of Course, Much That Historians Can Learn from Novelists"

"Fifteenth-century history is highly contested, and much of what Jones must navigate his way through has been the subject of intense historiographical debate: how much was William de la Pole, Earl and later Duke of Suffolk, chief minister to Henry VI, to blame for what went wrong in the 1440s? Jones does not interrupt his narrative to introduce the disputed nature of events, but he does give a strong line of argument, and those who wish to know the terms of the argument must head to his notes. This is not to suggest any antithesis between history as research and narrative: one paragraph, about the library of Katherine de la Pole, abbess of Barking Abbey, struck me as taking a phenomenal amount of research to construct, but Jones rises elegantly to the challenge."


In New Statesmen, Suzannah Lipscomb reviews Tracy Boorman's Thomas Cromwell: the Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant and Dan Jones's The Hollow Crown: the Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors.