From this week’s Spectator: The Winter King

This review of Thomas Penn’s biography of Henry VII, by Leanda de Lisle, is taken from the latest issue of the magazine. It is reproduced here for readers of this blog.

There is something of Gordon Brown in the older Henry VII: an impression of darkness, of paranoia and barely suppressed rage, not to mention the terrifying tax grabs and tormenting of enemies. But Gordon was never quite as entertaining, or frightening, as Thomas Penn’s Winter King in this brilliant mash-up of gothic horror and political biography.

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Simon Cook

Pensioners have never had it so good

David Starkey once declared Henry VII ‘boring’. But in writing his magnus opus on the supposedly more interesting Henry VIII he got so caught up in the drama of Henry VII’s court that Henry VIII is now largely being relegated to volume two of his own biography.