John Paul Davis

This comprehensive history of the Tower is an engaging read on the most part. Every so often my attention wavered on aspects that didn’t interest me, but then this is a thorough history. In fact, it’s like a condensed history of England from Norman times onwards.

I spotted a couple of factual errors. It states that Edward III’s consort Philippa of Hainault died of plague yet every other source I’ve read state she died of dropsy.

It also states that Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, received the punishment of banishment when she was in fact imprisoned for the rest of her life.

Overall, though, this is a very good read.… (más)

So what's your problem?

That is the question we might ask of King Henry III. He was the first English king since the Norman Conquest to be overthrown by his own people. (Yes, he was allowed to keep his throne, but it was a very near thing; had he lived after rather than before Edward II, he might not have.) He was forever in debt. He was constantly accused of breaking his promises. Many of his barons found him untrustworthy. He lost territory in France, and eventually conceded he could not regain it; he never did manage to solve the situation in Wales. It is a picture of total mismanagement.

That we know from history. The question is, why? Who was this man, the grandson of the great Henry II, the father of the great Edward I, that he proved so inept? Aren't these the questions a biography is supposed to answer?

In that regard, Henry III has been singularly ill-served. Most English monarchs have multiple biographies, often of very high quality (the volumes in the Yale English Monarchs series spring to mind). Yet Henry III had nothing. When I found this biography -- the only modern biography of Henry III -- I was happy to buy it. Only to find that it doesn't explain anything. The first 240 or so pages of the book are basically a chronology: So-and-so rebelled. Henry met the King of (somewhere) and got nothing out of it. Henry went broke. So-and-so rebelled. Repeat ad nauseum. It is quickly clear that Henry wasn't a good ruler. But we don't know how the failures came about.

Only in the last twenty or so pages does author Davis try to give us a picture of Henry as a person. But even this offers more catalog than insight: Here are Henry's good traits (piety and family devotion and a relatively pacific nature, especially when compared to hotheads like his uncle Richard the Lion-Hearted-and-Bone-Headed); here are his bad traits (just about everything else). I didn't know any more after reading it than before.

Perhaps, if you want to know what happened in England from 1216 to 1272, this book will serve you well enough. But should you want to know why, forget it.… (más)

This is another novel set in the Scillies that I have read while there (I actually began it on the train to Penzance). This one is a rather unlikely thriller involving Aztec treasure and the legacy of the conquistadors Cortes and Pizarro in a bizarre and rather ridiculous treasure map story. The characters are two dimensional (almost all non-Scillonians) and nearly all unlikeable, with the dialogue often striking this reader as very stilted and unnatural. Though it is always good to read novels set on my favourite islands, they are almost unrecognisable here - many of the details are fictionalised but fairly close to the real thing, which creates confusion if one knows the islands well, while the author has also chosen to create a wholly fictional formerly inhabited island which is central to the plot, St Lide's, which supposedly lies south east of St Agnes and south of St Mary's. Many of the features of St Lide's combine features of other islands, especially the Civil War remains on Tresco. There are also some plain errors, such as placing the Cornish town of St Just on the coast. The ending was rushed and unclear with many of the characters meeting their ends for no very obvious reasons. Not recommended, either for Scilly lovers or for readers of thrillers.… (más)