Q: Your bestselling work of history The Six Wives of Henry VIII was published in 1991, and since then many of your books have been on related subjects. What makes this period so engaging?
A: The characters. They’re dynamic, larger than life. It’s a very dramatic period. Also, we’ve got an unprecedented amount of source material. No details were considered too trivial to be reported by ambassadors. Henry VIII’s great matter brought the royal marriage into public focus for the first time in history. So we have a lot of information. Even so, there are tantalising gaps, and historians can endlessly debate them.
We’ve also got the visual record. We can see something of the magnificence of the Tudor palaces, like Hampton Court. There were wonderful costumes in that era, which grabs many people. And this is the age of the spread of diplomacy and printing.
The book, according to the author