Among the beautiful people revelling on deck was William Aetheling, grandson of William the Conqueror and sole legitimate son of Henry I. It was published in 2012 in the United Kingdom and a year. The narrative opens in 1120 with a drunken party aboard a white ship – the White Ship. The Plantagenets: The Kings and Queens Who Made England is a history book written by Dan Jones. As I sometimes stop mid-paragraph to daydream around a subject, I was grateful to be kept on track by a text that is simple and direct, without leaving me feeling patronised. Jones avoids this with a combination of gripping storytelling and pin-sharp clarity. The risk with a long dynastic history is that it becomes just one damn thing after another, and the reader gets lost in a snowstorm of names and events. The Plantagenets (2012) is a rollicking history of eight generations of English royal rule. Jones covers an enormous amount of ground: eight generations of kings and queens from 1120 to 1399. We both read into the night, but I was the one reading passages out loud. Bed time, back to back: him reading George R R Martin’s hugely popular Game of Thrones fantasy fiction me reading Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets. The present book is Dan Jones at his best covering a period he is most comfortable with, the reign of the Plantagenets from Henry II to Richard II and ending with the rise of the House of Lancaster which will ultimately lead to the War of the Roses another area where Jones excels. It has been a week of competitive reading in the de Lisle household.
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