Thomas More, as Joanne Paul observes in the opening sentence of this entertaining and thought-provoking new biography, is ‘one of the most divisive figures in English history’. The incorruptible hero of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and the sneering, persecutory villain of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, More has been a controversial figure for nearly five centuries. 

With the Reformation, More’s life and death came to assume huge symbolic importance. That presents the biographer with a challenge: how to strip away layers of mythology without eroding the public’s interest in the subject? Paul, author of an outstanding earlier study of Thomas More’s political thought, goes further than most in seeking to pare things down to the essentials of the ‘historical’ More. 

The book begins with a significant new finding: that More was in all probability born not near Cheapside, as biographers have always supposed, but in less salubrious Cripplegate, on the precarious northern edge of the capital. Paul is terrific at evoking the sights and spaces of early 16th-century London,