Alan Judd

C. J. Sansom’s Revelation (Pan, £7.99) is the fourth in his series of Tudor crime novels featuring his crookback lawyer-detective, Matthew Shardlake. A series of horrific murders forces Shardlake to fish in troubled waters which throw up Protestant extremist threats to the state, dangerous knowledge of Henry VIII’s wooing of the reluctant Catherine Parr, confinement in Bedlam, the dilemma of Archbishop Cranmer and the perils of the Court. Throughout this original and well-wrought series, Sansom tells good stories through characters not only credible but interesting, evoking a persuasive picture of Tudor town life, legal practice and political reality without clogging his narrative with authentic but extraneous detail. He is particularly adept at conveying, rather than preaching, the difficulty of living with the fundamental issue of the time — religious and political allegiance.

Moving on a few decades, David Ellis’s That Man Shakespeare (Helm Information Ltd, £38) is a masterly and timely piece of corrective scholarship. Although we know more about Shakespeare than about most Elizabethans, we know much less than we should like and Ellis casts a wise and sceptical eye over Shakespearean historiography. He doesn’t attempt yet another biography, nor a compendium of everything that is known, but offers a helpful, sane and deeply informed guide through all that we do know and — more importantly — what we think we know but don’t.

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