JANUARY 2025 - AudioFile
Listeners who know England's King Henry V primarily through Shakespeare's history plays will be enlightened and only a little disappointed with this authenticated, unromanticized biography of the storied "warrior king." With urbane ease and a gift for telling detail, British popular historian Dan Jones guides listeners through the tangled histories of the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, and the internecine Plantagenet family. In this latest Jones focuses not on Henry's great victories over France, but on the grubby, decidedly unromantic business of transporting and maintaining a fifteenth-century army and the even trickier business of negotiating a peace settlement with the medieval French court. It's not Shakespeare, and it's not poetic. But it's every bit as compelling. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
08/12/2024
In this rousing biography, historian Jones (Powers and Thrones) departs from Shakespeare’s portrait of Prince Hal as a wild, roistering youth. In Jones’s telling, Henry even in adolescence was a determined military leader, upholder of the faith, and dominant figure in the court of his father, Henry IV. His own orderly reign brought stability to England, allowing him to (barely) finance his conquest of much of France. Bookish and artistic, he meticulously stage-managed his public image, but was also on occasion barbarically cruel: he first ordered men to be drawn and quartered at 14; refused to let starving women and children pass through his siege lines at Rouen; and beheaded a soldier for playing irritating trumpet solos. Jones’s colorful narrative reads like House of Dragons minus the dragons; it’s full of pageantry and tumult and betrayal (like an incident during the chaotic civil wars in France, when the son of mad King Charles VI invited John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, to an unarmed parley and then had the too-fearless duke stabbed in the back). While he admires Henry, Jones dispels glamorous myths—Shakespeare’s grandiloquent “St. Crispin’s Day” speech probably sounded more like, “Fellas, let’s go”—and reveals the prosaic realities of his wars: constant money-grubbing and pointless suffering. This stimulating portrait of an iconic ruler roots his glorious deeds in sordid reality. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Rousing… Jones’s colorful narrative reads like House of the Dragon minus the dragons; it’s full of pageantry and tumult and betrayal… This stimulating portrait of an iconic ruler roots his glorious deeds in sordid reality.”–Publishers Weekly
“Jones specializes in traditional great-men-and-politics histories of the Middle Ages, and this is a good one.”–Kirkus Reviews
"The king of exciting narrative history triumphs again. A masterclass in making the medieval addictively readable."—Lucy Worsley, author of Agatha Christie
"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, author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem
"With his customary combination of profound scholarship and fine narrative verve, Dan Jones brings Henry V to life better than anyone since Shakespeare himself."—Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill and Napoleon
Library Journal
11/02/2024
Considered by many to be England's most heroic king, Henry V is the subject of this fine biography by Jones (Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages; host of the podcast This Is History: A Dynasty To Die For and the Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles). The image most people have of Henry is that of Shakespeare's fierce warrior at Agincourt. Readers get that version in Jones's book, but much more as well. Jones situates Henry in the web of his familial relationships, international affairs, and philosophical and religious contexts. Henry comes across as crude in some ways but also clever and astute about human nature. Jones writes the book almost entirely in the present tense, and while at first this approach can be off-putting, it does bring a certain immediacy to the events being described, drawing readers into Henry's life. The events of the book took place over five centuries ago, with different rules of war, politics, and religion, but Jones's gift is to make this history feel contemporary. VERDICT Recommended for general readers who enjoy swift-paced historical biographies. Those seeking the heroic and the romantic will find much to enjoy.—David Azzolina