Jessie Childs
Murder Most Royal
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
By Alison Weir
Jonathan Cape 416pp £20 order from our bookshop
It was Jimmy Goldsmith who said that when you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy, but it could just as easily have been Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn’s great folly lay in her inability to adapt to the role of consort when, after a six-year-long struggle and the fracturing of Christendom, she finally married her man. She refused to temper her feisty, flirty spirit, she neglected to look the other way when Henry’s eye wandered and, fatally, she failed to produce a male heir. Had she behaved more like a wife and less like a mistress, Anne Boleyn might not have ended her days as ‘the lady in the Tower’.
Alison Weir’s title is taken from a letter, almost certainly forged, purportedly from Anne to Henry VIII. It is also shared with a Jean Plaidy novel, but unlike the fiction, which covered the rise as well as the fall of Anne Boleyn, Weir’s work of non-fiction concentrates on
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
'The day Simon and I Vespa-d from Daunt to Daunt to John Sandoe to Hatchards to Goldsboro, places where many of the booksellers have become my friends over the years, was the one with the high puffy clouds, the very strong breeze, the cool-warm sunlight.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
Some salient thoughts on book collecting from Michael Dirda with a semi tragic conclusion that I suspect many of us can relate to from the @Lit_Review #WednesdayMotivation
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5