I was drawn to this biography of the Wars of the Roses because of the five-person focus, though as it transpired, what I found was another general rendition of what went on during the Wars, with the usual players – Edward IV, Richard III, Henrys VI & VII, etc. – taking centre stage.

Trouble is, with the likes of Jane Shore, very little info is available. As a result, the author refers to events featuring her father, John Lambert, to compensate. Even so, there’s not a great deal of info on him either.

I was particularly interested in matters concerning John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. He was a huge asset to Henry Tudor and it’s probable that the earl is the main reason why Henry became king.

So the title is a bit misleading. Yes, the five are referred to, but the narrative does not revolve around them as implied. Lack of historical records make this difficult.

The author’s style is engaging at times but not at others. The section when Richard becomes king is the most appealingly written. ( )

I bought this because I needed to read a history of the Wars of the Roses, as my knowledge of the events was rather patchy. Since this book focusses on the lives of relatively minor characters, I am still unenlightened as to the major events of the conflict, but know more than I will ever need to know about the life of the father of the king's mistress. ( )

This is a concise account of the Wars of the Roses anchored around the lives of five contemporaries: William Hastings, a partisan of Edward IV; Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII; the Lancastrian earl of Oxford; Dr John Morton, later a cardinal; and the middle-class Jane Shore, a mistress of Edward IV. While parts of the book are a little dry, thanks to the complexities of names and titles and various relations with claims to different things through births and marriages, Seward overall does a good job at pulling things together. Given that this is a popular history book, I thought Seward did a better than average job at acknowledging the ways in which the surviving sources shape our understanding of the past and the roles played by women. This is a couple of hundred years after my normal area of interest, however, so I can't speak to its accuracy. ( )