Wars of the Roses (Jones)

Book Reviews
Jones tells a good story. That is a good thing, since storytelling has gone out of favor among so many historians.... He admits that the era is at times incomprehensible, yet he manages to impose upon it sufficient order to render this book both edifying and utterly entertaining. His delightful wit is as ferocious as the dreadful violence he describes.
The Times (UK)


Jones is a born storyteller, peopling the terrifying uncertainties of each moment with a superbly drawn cast of characters and powerfully evoking the brutal realities of civil war. With gripping urgency he shows this calamitous conflict unfold.
Evening Standard (UK)


Exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history. There are battles fought in snowstorms, beheadings, jousts, clandestine marriages, spurious genealogies, flashes of chivalry and streaks of pure malevolence.... Jones’s material is thrilling, but it is quite a task to sift, select, structure, and contextualize the information. There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)


Jones’s greatest skill as a historical writer is to somehow render sprawling, messy epochs such as this one into manageable, easily digestible matter; he is keenly tuned to what should be served up and what should be omitted. And he still finds rooms for the telling anecdote and vivid descriptive passage. It makes for an engrossing read and a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the Lancastrian-Yorkist struggle.
Spectator (UK)

A fine new history.... Tautly structured, elegantly written, and finely attuned to the values and sensibilities of the age, The Wars of the Roses is probably the best introduction to the conflict currently in print.
Mail on Sunday (UK)


(Starred review.) It’s not often that a book manages to be both scholarly and a page-turner, but British historian Jones succeeds on both counts in this entertaining follow-up to his bestselling The Plantagenets.... Jones sets a new high-water mark in the current revisionism of the Tudor era.
Publishers Weekly


[H]istorian Jones traces the British crown from the fall of Henry V in 1422 to the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the early 1500s.... [T]he author's painstaking attention to detail is the same as in his previous work.... This excellent and fairly accessible contribution to the history of the Wars of the Roses serves as a helpful corrective to previous mythologized versions. —Ben Neal, Richland Lib., Columbia, SC
Library Journal


In a follow-up to The Plantagenets...British historian Jones authoritatively sets the scene for the next brutal act: the 15th-century succession crises.... Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois, ... remarried in some obscurity in 1431 a charming Welsh squire named Oweyn Tidr, aka Owen Tudor. Their grandson in exile, Henry Tudor, would emerge gloriously to...become King Henry VII.
Kirkus Reviews