Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a short-story writer, novelist, journalist and a screenwriter from Colombia. He was a reporter for a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, and also a foreign correspondent stationed in New York, Rome, Paris and Barcelona. Marquez is the author of numerous popular novels and short stories. He is well known for his unique literary style known as magical realism, in which he describes reality through magical events and elements. His most popular novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Gabriel García Márquez

Kami Garcia

Eric Garcia

Helena Garcia

Héctor García is a citizen of Japan, where he has lived for over a decade, and of Spain, where he was born. He is the author of several books about Japanese culture, including two worldwide bestsellers, A Geek in Japan and Ikigai. A former software engineer, he worked at CERN in Switzerland before moving to Japan.

Héctor García

Dr. Justin R. Garcia is an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher. He is Executive Director &amp; Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute. He is also the Scientific Advisor to Match Group and Match.com, where he provides expertise to the company’s annual Singles in America study. His research has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TIME, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair.

Justin Garcia

Eduardo Garcia has written dozens of stories for the New York Times on how people can reduce their carbon footprint. He has written news stories and features from more than a dozen countries in his more than fifteen years as a journalist. A native of Spain, Eduardo cut his teeth working as a Reuters correspondent in Guatemala, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador. Eduardo strives to lead a sustainable lifestyle and believes in using words to empower people.

Eduardo Garcia

Roberto Garcia

Sarah Gabriel

Lisa Gabriele

Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She studied English at Edinburgh University before attending medical school in London and becoming a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. Her Sunday Times bestselling debut, Direct Red, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the PEN-Ackerley Award for Autobiography, while her novel Dirty Work won the McKitterick Prize. The presenter of several BBC TV series, including Trust Me I’m a Doctor and Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook, she currently works as a part-time surgeon and lives in London with her husband and children.

Gabriel Weston

Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

Philip Gabriel

Gabrielle Kent worked as a graphic artist on video games before becoming a senior lecturer in games development. Now a full-time author, her work includes Alfie Bloom - a series about a boy who inherits a castle and a whole load of magical problems, Knights and Bikes - a series based on the video game of the same name, and Rani Reports, featuring a girl who wants to be an investigative journalist and her adventures with her rambunctious Mauritian nani. Gabrielle lives in the North East of England with her husband, daughter and agoraphobic cat.

Gabrielle Kent

Gabrielle Pinto

Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast. His first novel, My Absolute Darling was a Sunday Times bestseller, a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Tallent lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and children.

Gabriel Tallent

Gabriel Pogrund is Whitehall Editor at the Sunday Times. He was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards (2023). He won Scoop of the Year at the London Press Club Awards (2022) and was the Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post in 2018.

Gabriel Pogrund

Gabrielle Grillo lives in Bordeaux, France and she likes to knit conventional stuff like scarves and cardigans. She discovered the world of strange knits in 2010 and chose to start a Tumblr about it.

Gabrielle Grillo

Gabrielle Mander

Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of the multi-billion dollar internet privacy company, DuckDuckGo. He contributes to a number of publications including Medium and is the co-author of Traction.

Gabriel Weinberg

Elizabeth Gabriel

Gabrielle Rifkind

Gabrielle Marcola

Born in Italy and now living in London, Gabriele Marcotti is a senior writer and analyst for ESPN, World Football Correspondent for The Times and UK correspondent for Corriere dello Sport. His previous books include The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures, shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and Capello: Portrait of a Winner.

Gabriele Marcotti

GABRIEL GATEHOUSE is a journalist and broadcaster. The former International Editor of Newsnight and co-host of Ukrainecast on BBC Sounds, he has reported from almost every recent conflict around the world, from Ukraine to Syria, Libya to Iraq. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, most recently the 2023 Broadcasting Press Guild (for The Coming Storm podcast) and the 2020 Foreign Press Association award for his coverage of the Hong Kong protests. He has reported extensively from the United States on the rise and fall of Donald Trump. His podcast, The Coming Storm, which launched in January 2022 to critical acclaim, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Gabriel Gatehouse

Ester García-Cortés

Gabrielle Hatfield

Gabriel Chevallier

Gabrielle Hamilton

Adolfo García Ortega

Gabrielle Griffiths grew up in Aberdeenshire and now lives in Brighton. She was a Madeleine Milburn Agency mentee in 2021 and is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

Gabrielle Griffiths

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Jonathan Sumption

Edward III ruled England for fifty years. He was a paragon of kingship in the eyes of his contemporaries, the perfect king in those of later generations. Venerated as the victor of Sluys and Crécy and the founder of the Order of the Garter, he was regarded with awe even by his enemies. But he lived too long, and was ultimately condemned to see thirty years of conquests reversed in less than five. In this gripping new account of Edward III's rise and fall, Jonathan Sumption introduces us to a fêted king who ended his life a heroic failure. 
 
Jonathan Sumption is a former history fellow of Magdalen College Oxford. He is the author of Pilgrimage and The Albigensian Crusade, as well as the first four volumes in his celebrated history of the Hundred Years War, Trial by Battle, Trial by Fire, Divided Houses and Cursed Kings. He was awarded the 2009 Wolfson History Prize for Divided Houses.

Edward III (Penguin Monarchs)

A Heroic Failure

Mark Kishlansky

The tragedy of Charles I dominates one of the most strange and painful periods in British history as the whole island tore itself apart over a deadly, entangled series of religious and political disputes.  In Mark Kishlansky's brilliant account it is never in doubt that Charles created his own catastrophe, but he was nonetheless opposed by men with far fewer scruples and less consistency who for often quite contradictory reasons conspired to destroy him.  This is a remarkable portrait of one of the most talented, thoughtful, loyal, moral, artistically alert and yet, somehow, disastrous of all this country's rulers.

Charles I (Penguin Monarchs)

An Abbreviated Life

Stephen Alford

Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, became king at the age of nine and died wholly unexpectedly at the age of fifteen. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use the child to further their own ends, but who were also playing a long game - assuming that Edward would long outlive them and become as commanding a figure as his father had been. 
 
Stephen Alford's wonderful book gives full play to the murky, sinister nature of Edward's reign, but is also a poignant account of a boy learning to rule, learning to enjoy his growing power and to come out of the shadows of the great aristocrats around him. England's last child monarch, Edward would have led his country in a quite different direction to the catastrophic one caused by his death.

Edward VI (Penguin Monarchs)

The Last Boy King

Helen Castor

In the popular imagination, as in her portraits, Elizabeth I is the image of monarchical power. The Virgin Queen ruled over a Golden Age: the Spanish Armada was defeated; English explorers reached the ends of the earth; a new Church of England rose from the ashes of past conflict; the English Renaissance bloomed in the genius of Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney. But the image is also armour. 
 
In this illuminating account of Elizabeth's reign, Helen Castor shows how England's iconic queen was shaped by profound and enduring insecurity-an insecurity which was both a matter of practical political reality and personal psychology. From her precarious upbringing at the whim of a brutal, capricious father and her perilous accession after his death, to the religious division that marred her state and the failure to marry that threatened her line, Elizabeth lived under constant threat. But, facing down her enemies with a compellingly inscrutable public persona, the last and greatest of the Tudor monarchs would become a timeless, fearless queen.

Elizabeth I (Penguin Monarchs)

A Study in Insecurity

Clare Jackson

Charles II has always been one of the most instantly recognisable British kings - both in his physical appearance, disseminated through endless portraits, prints and pub signs, and in his complicated mix of lasciviousness, cynicism and luxury. His father's execution and his own many years of exile made him a guarded, curious, unusually self-conscious ruler. He lived through some of the most striking events in the national history - from the Civil Wars to the Great Plague, from the Fire of London to the wars with the Dutch. 
 
Clare Jackson's marvellous book takes full advantage of its irrepressible subject.

Charles II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Star King

Piers Brendon

'After my death', George V said of his eldest son and heir, 'the boy will ruin himself in 12 months'. From the death of his father in 1936 to the constitutional crisis provoked by his proposal to the then-married American socialite Wallis Simpson and his subsequent abdication, Edward VIII reigned for less than year. In choosing the woman he loved over his royal birthright, Edward fulfilled his father's prophecy and instigated the monarchy's most significant upheaval of the twentieth century. Retitled 'Duke of Windsor' and essentially exiled, Edward has remained a controversial figure ever since. Through his correspondence with, amongst other confidants, Winston Churchill, Piers Brendon traces Edward's tumultuous life in this superb, pacey biography.

Edward VIII (Penguin Monarchs)

The Uncrowned King

Richard Abels

There is a long tradition of cheering on the major monarchs of England, generally warriors such as Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror and Richard the Lionheart. But there is an argument that the more interesting monarchs are the ones who through their own fault or through having to live through terrible times, show the limits of human action and the degree to which political life can go completely wrong. 
 
In his fascinating new book in the Penguin Monarchs series, Richard Abels examines the long and troubled reign of Aethelred II the 'Unraed', the 'Ill-Advised'. It is characteristic of Aethelred's reign that its greatest surviving work of literature, the poem The Battle of Maldon, should be a record of heroic defeat. Perhaps no ruler could have stemmed the encroachment of wave upon wave of Viking raiders, but Aethelred will always be associated with that failure.

Aethelred the Unready (Penguin Monarchs)

The Failed King

John Edwards

The elder daughter of Henry VIII, Mary I (1553-58) became England's ruler on the unexpected death of her brother Edward VI. Her short reign is one of the great potential turning points in the country's history. As a convinced Catholic and the wife of Philip II, king of Spain and the most powerful of all European monarchs, Mary could have completely changed her country's orbit, making it a province of the Habsburg Empire and obedient again to Rome. 
 
These extraordinary possibilities are fully dramatized in John Edward's superb short biography. The real Mary I has almost disappeared under the great mass of Protestant propaganda that buried her reputation during her younger sister, Elizabeth I's reign. But what if she had succeeded?

Mary I (Penguin Monarchs)

The Daughter of Time

Jonathan Keates

William III (1689-1702) &amp; Mary II (1689-94) (Britain's only ever 'joint monarchs') changed the course of the entire country's history, coming to power through a coup (which involved Mary betraying her own father), reestablishing parliament on a new footing and, through commiting Britain to fighting France, initiating an immensely long period of warfare and colonial expansion.  Jonathan Keates' wonderful book makes both monarchs vivid, the cold, shrewd 'Dutch' William and the shortlived Mary, whose life and death inspired Purcell to write some of his greatest music.

William III & Mary II (Penguin Monarchs)

Partners in Revolution

David Woodman

Edward the Confessor, one of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, is in part a figure of myths created in the later medieval period. David Woodman traces the course of his 24-year-long reign through the lens of contemporary sources, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Vita Ædwardi Regis to the Bayeux Tapestry, to uncover the fraught and complex politics of his life. Edward was a shrewd politician who, having endured a long period of exile from England in his youth, ascended the throne in 1042 and came to control a highly sophisticated administration. Such was his power in the mid-eleventh century that the late Anglo-Saxon coinage from his reign is the only example in western Europe of a royal monopoly across such a large area. 
 
 What we know as 'England' had only relatively recently come into being and Woodman constructs a portrait of an age by untangling the truth from the saintly legend and shows how the events of Edward's reign led, through many twists and turns, to the Norman Conquest.

Edward the Confessor (Penguin Monarchs)

The Sainted King

Richard Davenport-Hines

Like his mother Queen Victoria, Edward VII defined an era. Both reflected the personalities of their central figures: hers grand, imperial and pretty stiff; his no less grand, but much more relaxed and enjoyable. This book conveys Edward's distinct personality and significant influences. To the despair of his parents, he rebelled as a young man, conducting many affairs and living a life of pleasure. But as king he made a distinct contribution to European diplomacy and - which is little known - to London, laying out the Mall and Admiralty Arch. 
 
Richard Davenport-Hines's book is as enjoyable as its subject and the age he made.

Edward VII (Penguin Monarchs)

The Cosmopolitan King

David Womersley

'James was a king tragically trapped by principle. Yet was it wise to attempt to change the national religion?' 
 
The short reign of James II is generally seen as one of the most catastrophic in British history, ending in his exile after he unsuccessfully tried to convert England to Catholicism, a crisis that would haunt the monarchy for generations. Ultimately, David Womersley's biography shows, James was a man whose blindness to subtlety and political reality brought about his ruinous downfall.

James II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Last Catholic King

John Guy

Henry VIII's reign transformed the physical and spiritual landscape of England. Magnificent, tyrannical, a strong ruler, a 'pillager of the commonwealth', this most notorious of kings remains a figure of extreme contradictions: a devout traditionalist who oversaw a cataclysmic rupture with the church in Rome; a talented, charismatic, imposing figure who nevertheless could not bear to meet people's eyes when he talked to them. In this revealing new account, John Guy explores how Henry himself understood the world and his place in it - from his sheltered and increasingly isolated upbringing and the blazing glory of his accession; to his desperate quest for recognition, fame and an heir, and the terrifying paranoia of his last, agonising, 54-inch-waisted years - and in doing so casts new light on his choice of wives and ministers, his impact on the European stage, and his extraordinary legacy.

Henry VIII (Penguin Monarchs)

The Quest for Fame

Tom Holland

The formation of England happened against the odds - the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world. But King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex, his son Eadweard expanded it, and his grandson Æthelstan finally united Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and became Rex totius Britanniae. 
 
Tom Holland recounts this extraordinarily exciting story with relish and drama. We meet the great figures of the age, including Alfred and his daughter Æthelflæd, 'Lady of the Mercians', who brought Æthelstan up at the Mercian court. At the end of the book we understand the often confusing history of the Anglo-Saxon kings better than ever before.

Athelstan (Penguin Monarchs)

The Making of England

Anne Curry

Henry V's invasion of France, in August 1415, represented a huge gamble. As heir to the throne, he had been a failure, cast into the political wilderness amid rumours that he planned to depose his father. Despite a complete change of character as king - founding monasteries, persecuting heretics, and enforcing the law to its extremes - little had gone right since. He was insecure in his kingdom, his reputation low. On the eve of his departure for France, he uncovered a plot by some of his closest associates to remove him from power. 
 
Agincourt was a battle that Henry should not have won - but he did, and the rest is history. Within five years, he was heir to the throne of France. In this vivid new interpretation, Anne Curry explores how Henry's hyperactive efforts to expunge his past failures, and his experience of crisis - which threatened to ruin everything he had struggled to achieve - defined his kingship, and how his astonishing success at Agincourt transformed his standing in the eyes of his contemporaries, and of all generations to come.

Henry V (Penguin Monarchs)

From Playboy Prince to Warrior King

Stella Tillyard

George IV spent most of his life waiting to become king: as a pleasure-loving and rebellious Prince of Wales during the sixty-year reign of his father, George III, and for ten years as Prince Regent, when his father went mad. 
 
'The days are very long when you have nothing to do' he once wrote plaintively, but he did his best to fill them with pleasure - women, art, food, wine, fashion, architecture. He presided over the creation of the Regency style, which came to epitomise the era, and he was, with Charles I, the most artistically literate of all our kings. Yet despite his life of luxury and indulgence, George died alone and unmourned. 
 
Stella Tillyard has not written a judgemental book, but a very human and enjoyable one, about this most colourful of all British kings.

George IV (Penguin Monarchs)

King in Waiting

Roger Knight

William IV, 'the Sailor King', is best known for his naval career and for living for twenty years with the actress Mrs Jordan, with whom he had ten children. Knight's book shows that William was pretty much a disaster in whatever field he found himself.

William IV (Penguin Monarchs)

A King at Sea

Thomas Asbridge

Richard I's reign is both controversial and seemingly contradictory. One of England's most famous medieval monarchs and a potent symbol of national identity, he barely spent six months on English soil during a ten-year reign and spoke French as his first language. Contemporaries dubbed him the 'Lionheart', reflecting a carefully cultivated reputation for bravery, prowess and knightly virtue, but this supposed paragon of chivalry butchered close to 3,000 prisoners in cold blood on a single day. And, though revered as Christian Europe's greatest crusader, his grand campaign to the Holy Land failed to recover the city of Jerusalem from Islam. 
 
Seeking to reconcile this conflicting evidence, Thomas Asbridge's incisive reappraisal of Richard I's career questions whether the Lionheart really did neglect his kingdom, considers why he devoted himself to the cause of holy war and asks how the memory of his life came to be interwoven with myth. Richard emerges as a formidable warrior-king, possessed of martial genius and a cultured intellect, yet burdened by the legacy of his dysfunctional dynasty and obsessed with the pursuit of honour and renown.

Richard I (Penguin Monarchs)

The Crusader King

Nicholas Vincent

King John ruled England for seventeen and a half years. For most of that time he enjoyed, if not popularity, then great wealth and power. Yet to posterity his entire reign has come to be embodied in a single image. Furious, outmanoeuvred, crippled with vice, the King sits at Runnymede sealing or more often (and anachronistically) signing Magna Carta. No matter whether we approach this event as reactionaries wishing that the King would assert himself, as conservatives delighted by the restoration of constitutional 'rights', or as radicals longing for liberty and revolution, Runnymede changes everything in our perception of King John. Seventeen years of history are reduced to a picnic on the banks of the Thames. John is exposed as villainous and pathetic. The people triumph. Tyranny is righted. 
 
 Nicholas Vincent's fascinating portrayal of a complex man unpicks the character behind one of England's most despised kings. Was he as evil as legend suggests? Or has he been unfairly misunderstood?

John (Penguin Monarchs)

An Evil King?

Douglas Hurd

Elizabeth II is the longest-serving monarch who ever sat on the English or British throne. Yet her personality and influence remain elusive. This book, by a senior politician who has spent significant periods of time in her company, and is also a distinguished historian, portrays her more credibly than any other yet published.

Elizabeth II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Steadfast

Jeremy Black

King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant for America's Founding Fathers, and for his madness, both of which have been portrayed on stage and screen. 
 
In this concise and penetrating biography, Jeremy Black turns away from the image-making and back to the archives, and instead locates George's life within his age: as a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war. 
 
Black shows how George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He also shows us a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art, architecture and science, who took the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to control his often wayward children even as his own mental health failed, and became Britain's longest reigning king.

George III (Penguin Monarchs)

Madness and Majesty

Rosemary Horrox

No English king has so divided opinion, both during his reign and in the centuries since, more than Richard III. 
 
 He was loathed in his own time for the never-confirmed murder of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and died fighting his own subjects on the battlefield. This is the vision of Richard we have inherited from Shakespeare. Equally, he inspired great loyalty in his followers. 
 
 In this enlightening, even-handed study, Rosemary Horrox builds a complex picture of a king who by any standard failed as a monarch. He was killed after only two years on the throne, without an heir, and brought such a decisive end to the House of York that Henry Tudor was able to seize the throne, despite his extremely tenuous claim. Whether Richard was undone by his own fierce ambitions, or by the legacy of a Yorkist dynasty which was already profoundly dysfunctional, the end result was the same: Richard III destroyed the very dynasty that he had spent his life so passionately defending.

Richard III (Penguin Monarchs)

A Failed King?

Ryan Lavelle

Cnut, or Canute, was King of England for nearly 20 years, dying in Dorset in 1035. A formidable figure, Cnut is one of the great 'what ifs' in English history. The culmination of a long period of Viking attacks and settlement across England, Cnut's reign could have permanently shifted 11th century England's orbit to Scandinavia. Stretching his authority across the North Sea to become king of Denmark and Norway, and with close links to Ireland and an overlordship of Scotland, Cnut created a Viking Empire at least as plausible as the Anglo-Norman Empire that would emerge in 1066. 
 
 Ryan Lavelle's book explores this fascinating and powerful man. He has popularly come down to us for the story of Canute and the waves - but he was a nation and empire builder on the grandest scale and his reign is a sort of masterclass in the contingent, wayward nature of history.

Cnut (Penguin Monarchs)

The North Sea King

Laura Ashe

Richard II (1377-99) came to the throne as a child, following the long, domineering, martial reign of his grandfather Edward III. He suffered from the disastrous combination of a most exalted sense of his own power and an inability to impress that power on those closest to the throne. Neither trusted nor feared, Richard battled with a whole series of failures and emergencies before finally succumbing to a coup, imprisonment and murder. 
 
Laura Ashe's brilliant account of his reign emphasizes the strange gap between Richard's personal incapacity and the amazing cultural legacy of his reign - from the Wilton Diptych to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales.

Richard II (Penguin Monarchs)

A Brittle Glory

Andy King

Edward I (1272-1307) is one of the most commanding of all English rulers. He fought in southwest France, in Wales, In Scotland and in northern France, he ruled with ruthlessness and confidence, undoing the chaotic failure of his father, Henry III's reign. He reshaped England's legal system and came close to bringing the whole island of Great Britain under his rule. He promoted the idea of himself as the new King Arthur, his Round Table still hanging in Winchester Castle to this day. His greatest monuments are the extraordinary castles - Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Harlech and Conwy - built to ensure his rule of Wales and some of the largest of all medieval buildings. 
 
Andy King's brilliant short biography brings to life a strange, complex man whose triumphs raise all kinds of questions about the nature of kingship - how could someone who established so many key elements in England's unique legal and parliamentary system also have been such a harsh, militarily brutal warrior?

Edward I (Penguin Monarchs)

A New King Arthur?

Sean Cunningham

Henry VII was one of England's unlikeliest monarchs. An exile and outsider with barely a claim to the throne, his victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field seemed to many in 1485 only the latest in the sequence of violent convulsions among England's nobility that would come to be known as the Wars of the Roses – with little to suggest that the obscure Henry would last any longer than his predecessor. To break the cycle of division, usurpation, deposition and murder, he had both to maintain a grip on power and to convince England that his rule was both rightful and effective. Here, Sean Cunningham explores how, in his ruthless and controlling kingship, Henry VII did so, in the process founding the Tudor dynasty.

Henry VII (Penguin Monarchs)

Treason and Trust

Christopher Given-Wilson

The reign of Edward II (1307-27) was a serious of total disasters, making him unsuccessful to an extent almost without equal. At some level Edward simply did not inspire trust or respect. He failed to be kingly, preferring ditching and cart-racing to jousting and falconry. He relied on favourites and seemed to alienate even the most natural supporters of the throne. His reign was convulsed by rebellion and attempts to reform the king's behaviour. In an attempt to throw off the spectre of his regal, soldierly father, Edward I, he invaded Scotland and suffered catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Bannockburn. After twenty ruinous years, betrayed and abandoned by most of his nobles and by his wife and her lover, Edward was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle where he was murdered. 
 
Christopher Given-Wilson's remarkable book gives a glimpse into the abyss: the terrors of kingship - where royal authority is based around strict succession by the eldest son, what happens when that eldest son is incapable of doing the job?

Edward II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Terrors of Kingship

John Gillingham

William II (1087-1100), or William Rufus, will always be most famous for his death: killed by an arrow while out hunting, perhaps through accident or perhaps murder.  But, as John Gillingham makes clear in this elegant book, as the son and successor to William the Conqueror it was William Rufus who had to establish permanent Norman rule.  A ruthless, irascible man, he frequently argued acrimoniously with his older brother Robert over their father's inheritance - but he also handed out effective justice, leaving as his legacy one of the most extraordinary of all medieval buildings, Westminster Hall.

William II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Red King

Philip Ziegler

If Ethelred was notoriously 'Unready' and Alfred 'Great', King George VI should bear the designation of 'George the Dutiful'. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. Inarticulate and loathing any sort of public appearances, he accepted that it was his destiny to figure regularly and conspicuously in the public eye, gritted his teeth, largely conquered his crippling stammer and got on with it. He was not born to be king, but he made an admirable one, and was the figurehead of the nation at the time of its greatest trial, during the Second World War. This is a sparklingly brilliant and enjoyable book about him.

George VI (Penguin Monarchs)

The Dutiful King

Carl Watkins

Known as 'the anarchy', the reign of Stephen (1135-1141) saw England plunged into a civil war that illuminated the fatal flaw in the powerful Norman monarchy, that without clear rules ordering succession, conflict between members of William the Conqueror's family were inevitable. But there was another problem, too: Stephen himself. 
 
With the nobility of England and Normandy anxious about the prospect of a world without the tough love of the old king Henry I, Stephen styled himself a political panacea, promising strength without oppression. As external threats and internal resistance to his rule accumulated, it was a promise he was unable to keep. Unable to transcend his flawed claim to the throne, and to make the transition from nobleman to king, Stephen's actions betrayed uneasiness in his role, his royal voice never quite ringing true. 
 
The resulting violence that spread throughout England was not, or not only, the work of bloodthirsty men on the make. As Watkins shows in this resonant portrait, it arose because great men struggled to navigate a new and turbulent kind of politics that arose when the king was in eclipse.

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