Lucy Wooding
For Queen and Country
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I
By Stephen Alford
Yale University Press 412pp £25 order from our bookshop
As a nation, we love the Tudors. We treasure their culture, poetry and theatre, their palaces, pictures and costumes. We cherish their armour, their castles and, to a certain extent, their prejudices about foreigners. Above all, we delight in their characters – bold, histrionic, tortured, vengeful and flamboyant. For Tudor historians, this is both a blessing and a curse. It is great that so many people are fascinated by this period in history, but this kind of enthusiasm inevitably perverts history. We want to improve on the story, embellish the characters. We want it to be like the historical novel, or the TV series, without the ambiguities and uncertainties of history.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings