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Description
The instant Sunday Times bestseller
A Times, BBC History Magazine and Daily Mail Book of the Year
The UK's bestselling medieval historian brings unforgettably to life the astonishing rise of Henry V, who survived rebellion, a near-fatal arrow wound and a lengthy and precarious princely apprenticeship to become England's greatest warrior king.
'A historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist.' Observer
Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just 35, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond.
The victor of Agincourt was a model king for his successors. Shakespeare's version of Henry V saw his youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship, and in the dark days of World War II, Henry's victories in France were recounted in British propaganda. Churchill called Henry 'a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England', while for one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, 'the greatest man who ever ruled England'.
For Dan Jones, Henry is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members, yet always seemed to triumph when it mattered.
As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured England's borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses.
Dan Jones's life of Henry V provides unprecedented insight into the critical first 26 years of his life before he became king. Both a standalone biography and a completion of Dan's sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England's greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.
Product details
Published | 03 Dec 2024 |
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Format | Hardback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 464 |
ISBN | 9781804541937 |
Imprint | Apollo |
Illustrations | 2 x 8 colour plates |
Dimensions | 234 x 153 mm |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Wildly gripping, swashbuckling, battle-scarred and blood-spattered, in equal parts ferocious, dynamic and political, intimate and humane, the best biography yet of England's greatest king
Simon Sebag Montefiore
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Jones' prose hums with energy throughout, and his ability to marry realm-scale intrigue with family drama marks this out as narrative history at its best
Daily Telegraph
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The king of exciting narrative history triumphs again. A masterclass in making the medieval addictively readable
Lucy Worsley
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Yet another Dan Jones book that I wish I had written. One of England's greatest medieval kings gets the biography he deserves from one of our greatest medieval historians
Dan Snow
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Jones is one of our liveliest historians, as well as one of the best informed ... [he] elegantly marries the authority and depth of his previous histories with the brio and wit of his fiction ... splendidly readable ... full of diverting incident and considered judgement
Observer
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[A] lively retelling of Henry's remarkable story ... [Jones'] narrative reads like a novel
The Times