Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty
It is a strange paradox of our egalitarian age that a progressive publisher like Penguin should commission — at considerable expense, since the series editor Simon Winder has netted some top academic authors — brief lives of all 44 English, and later British, monarchs, from Athelstan to his distant descendent, our own Queen Elizabeth. The 45th book in the series is devoted to our sole non-royal ruler, Oliver Cromwell. The biographies — each costing £10.99 — though not exactly ‘potted’, are necessarily squeezed by space — none is longer than 150 pages — into extended essays that can be comfortably devoured in a couple of hours; ideal for a railway