Yale University Press, 480pp, £25
‘Written with verve and based on impeccable scholarship, is peppered with human stories about the struggle to maintain a dynasty,’ Helen Carr wrote. Everything depended on the smooth succession of one king to the next. Without it, there was anarchy. Nothing illustrates this better than the capricious shifting of power between the rival royal houses of France and England during the 12th and 13th centuries, their stories irrevocably intertwined by familial feuding, war, intermarrying and attempting peace.
