Review: Mary Tudor – England’s First Queen by Linda Porter

Mary Tudor The First Queen is a biography on Mary Tudor. It looks into Mary’s life from her birth to her death and attempts to explore all facets of her life. The author, Linda Porter has tried to give her a sympathetic portrayal quite at odds with her more common ‘Bloody Mary’ image.

The style of writing is very good and flows easily from one chapter to another. The book is divided into parts each part dealing with a specific phase in Mary’s life. This makes it really easy to consult a certain thing without having to browse through the entire book.

Review: The Last Divine Office by Geoffrey Moorhouse

The Last Divine Office is a book that talks about the monastery at Durham, attached to the Durham Cathedral, from its history to its dissolution, and after. The book explores how the dissolution affected the lives of the monks, and how things changed for everyone, both within and outside the boundaries of the monastery. The book also touches on the laws passed with respect to the Dissolution of the Monasteries and goes into detail into some of the correspondence between the various actors, depicting exactly how the dissolution took place.

Review – Henry VIII: Reformer and Tyrant by Derek Wilson

This book is supposed to be a biography of King Henry VIII. Wilson claims that based on fascinating new source material, he built up a portrait of King Henry. I was only too eager to read this book, as I had not read any Henry biography for a while now.

However, I am amazed that someone should desire to write an entire book on a subject he dislikes to such a level that he goes all out to endow that person with negative ‘thoughts’ we never can prove he had and to twist actions related to him in a way to make him appear bad, when he never did any such thing.