Jones Dan - The Plantagenets: the warrior kings and queens who made England

Praise for The Plantagenets

A real life Game of Thrones, as dramatic and blood-soaked as any work of fantasy... Jones has opted for a bold narrative approach, anchored firmly upon the personalities of the monarchs. Fast-paced and accessible, The Plantagenets is old-fashioned storytelling and will be particularly appreciated by those who like their history red in tooth and claw.

The Wall Street Journal

The Plantagenets is rich in detail and scene-setting. You can almost smell the sea salt as the White Ship sinks and hear the screams of the tortured at the execution grounds at Tyburn.... But there is a larger point: the Plantagenets saga is the story of how English monarchs learned, or failed to learn, how to be kings, and how the English people, commoners and barons alike, learned how to limit their powers.

USA Today

Outstanding. Majestic in its sweep, compelling in its storytelling, this is narrative history at its best. A thrilling dynastic history of royal intrigues, violent skullduggery, and brutal warfare across two centuries of British history.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, bestselling author of Jerusalem:

The Biography and Young Stalin

Jones has brought the Plantagenets out of the shadows, revealing them in all their epic heroism and depravity. His is an engaging and readable account... researched with exacting standards. The result is an enjoyable, often harrowing journey through a bloody, insecure era in which many of the underpinnings of English kingship and Anglo-American constitutional thinking were formed.... Jones brings the world of the court, the nobility, and battlefield alive, and its compelling reading.

The Washington Post

Some of the greatest stories in all of English history... rich in pageantry and soaked in blood.

Lewis Lapham, Laphams Quarterly

The single best one-volume general introduction to the Plantagenets ever written... Jones proves time and again that hes alive to the inherent drama of his subject.... The kings and queens seem larger than life because, one strongly suspects, life was larger while they were in it. They brawled and laughed and rode and loved and warred (and occasionally peaced) as though the world itself depended on what they did. And they were right about that.

Open Letters Monthly

Jones, a protg of David Starkey, writes with his mentors erudition but also exhibits novelistic verve and sympathy.... This is a great popular history, whether you are au fait with the machinations of medievalism or whether the Magna Carta mystifies you.... The Plantagenets is proof that contemporary history can engage with the medieval world with style, wit, and chutzpah.

The Observer (London)

The risk with a long dynastic history is that it becomes just one damn thing after another, and the reader gets lost in the snowstorm of names and events. Jones avoids this with a combination of gripping storytelling and pin-sharp clarity.... The Plantagenets is a satisfying as well as an enjoyable read. There is no need for added goblins in this real life Game of Thrones.

The Literary Review

This action-packed narrative is, above all, a great story, filled with fighting, personality clashes, betrayal, and bouts of the famous Plantagenet rage.... Jones is an impressive guide to this tumultuous scene.... The Plantagenets succeeds in bringing an extraordinary family arrestingly to life.

The Telegraph (London)

A story filled with intrigue, murder, rebellion, military conflict (both internal and international), espionage, abdication, sexual shenanigans, and much more... Jones has provided a gripping overview of this exciting period.... Written in a lively narrative style, The Plantagenets is popular history at its best.

History in Review

A beautiful history... that frequently reads like a novel and can be opened to any chapter.... The Plantagenets is a brilliant and entertaining study of the roots of todays United Kingdom and its unwritten constitution.

Tampa Bay Times

Dan Joness epic portrait of the medieval royals is a timely reminder that things havent always been so rosy for those on the throne. The House of Plantagenet ruled England for more than two centuries, giving us eight generations of our best and worst kings and queensand some bloody, brutal, and brilliant tales to match.

GQ

Jones has written a magnificently rich and glittering medieval pageant, guiding us into the distant world of the Plantagenets with confidence. This riveting history of an all-too-human ruling house amply confirms the arrival of a formidably gifted historian.

Sunday Telegraph (London)

They may lack the glamour of the Tudors or the majesty of the Victorians, but the Plantagenets are just as essential to the foundation of modern Britain.... The great battles against the Scots and French and the subjugation of the Welsh make for thrilling reading but so do the equally enthralling struggles over succession, the Magna Carta, and the Provisions of Oxford.... Written with prose that keeps the reader captivated throughout accounts of the span of centuries and the not-always-glorious trials of kingship, this book is at all times approachable, academic, and entertaining.

Booklist

An excellent book... The Plantagenets is a wonderful gallop through English history. Powerful personalities, vivid descriptions of battles and tournaments, ladies in fine velvet, and knights in shining armor crowd the pages of this highly engaging narrative.

Evening Standard

This is an exciting period and Jones describes it with verve. He has a keen appreciation of how power was seized and wielded by medieval monarchs, and the way they manipulated history, religion, and symbolism in the service of kingship.... Medieval history is enjoying its time in the sun again thanks to some excellent writers. Heaven be praised for that.

New Statesman (London)

The Plantagenets played a defining part in shaping the nation of England, and Dan Jones tells their fascinating story with wit, verve, and vivid insight. This is exhilarating historya fresh and gloriously compelling portrait of a brilliant, brutal, and bloody-minded dynasty.

Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled

England before Elizabeth

This is history at its most epic and thrilling. I would defy anyone not to be royally entertained by it.

Tom Holland, author of Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Jones is an award-winning historian of the Middle Ages. A graduate of Cambridge University, where he studied under David Starkey, he is the author of Summer of Blood, a history of the Peasants Revolt of 1381, which was chosen by The Independent as Book of the Year. His four-part television series based on The Plantagenets, a number one bestseller in the UK and a New York Times bestseller, is currently in production and will be broadcast in 2015. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

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