Whether your Tudor monarch was a man or woman, looked like Bette Davis or not, you still had to live in fear in a sadistic land.

They seem to leave a lot out: the experience of women and the working classes and other outsiders often enter only when the ruling elite decides to offer them education, the vote or previously withheld opportunities. Ackroyd takes the reader through the lives of Henry VIII and his well known, but perhaps less well understood, quest for an heir; his son Edward VI; then the queen known as "Bloody Mary"; and finally the reign of Elizabeth which cemented and ended the Tudor era. Those who want to read a social history of the Tudor period as relates to the problem of enclosure and the effects of religious revolts and the instability of the Tudor regime would likely want to check out other books that would deal with those subjects.The witnesses after World War Two who suddenly turn, mid-rationing, saying ‘Oh, for a bit of butter! He brings together politics, religion, culture, and social experience, and ensures that the reader recognises the enormous changes wrought upon England during these years. If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of mistrusts and hatreds between Catholic and Protestants in England, this is a good place to start. S. Eliot when he was told he couldn't quote extensively from Eliot's poetry and unpublished letters. A Protestant herself, she ended the burnings for heresy, but many were executed for treason for plotting her overthrow.

Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. Volume II of this six volume series, 'Tudors', documents the sixteenth century reigns of England's most enigmatic dynasty. First thing to understand is that this is an overview, so if you are looking for a drill down into a particular time of English history that is not the purpose of this book. Having loved all Peter Ackroyd's previous books, and really enjoying his style of writing, I had high hopes for this. It wasn’t the ‘leader of East Germany’ who announced the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but an ill-informed Günter Schabowski, by mistake.The author concentrates more on this aspect in the earlier part of the book, and the various milestone events such as the king's courtship of Anne Boleyn are quite sketchily dealt with against this background. It is by and by that you start to realize that the author is concerned with the birth of the Anglican Church under the Tudor Monarchy – and it is in this light that it makes sense to deal with the first Tudor king, Henry VII. I thought this must be Charles Brandon, and looked it up in the index to see if there was a mention to confirm this but instead the page I'd been reading and indeed all mention of this man was under the erroneous entry of Thomas Brandon. Once people were willing to accept that even the Pope’s authority could be questioned and supplanted by the King’s, was it so much of a stretch to imagine that there shouldn’t be a King at all? Having written enthralling biographies of London and of its great river the Thames, acclaimed author Peter Ackroyd now turns to England itself in a landmark six-part history.