The week in books – Tudors, thinkers, dreamers and boozers

The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them.

The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins.

‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir. Having disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Henry only reinstated them in the succession towards the end of his life. He then decreed that if all his children died childless, the crown should go to the descendants of his younger sister, Mary, rather than those of his elder sibling, Margaret, who had been married to James IV of Scotland.