A brand-new life of England's greatest king from our bestselling medieval historian
'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 thirty-five, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond.
The victor of Agincourt was remembered as the acme of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship.
In the dark days of World War II, Henry's victories in France were presented by British filmmakers as exemplars for a people existentially threatened by Nazism.
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 warrior, but also bookish and artistic; a leader who made many mistakes, yet always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin and made England a serious player once more, yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses.
Written with vivid, page-turning immediacy, Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England's greatest king from our bestselling medieval historian.
