• B-format paperback. Praise for the hardback published in 2011: • "The best place to send anyone seriously wanting to get to grips with alternative understandings of England"s most mesmerizing monarch... copious illustrations, imaginatively chosen" BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE. • "A triumph of cool-headiness & concision" THE SPECTATOR. • "David Loades is one of our finest Tudor historians" ALISON WEIR. • "David Loades" Tudor biographies are both highly enjoyable and instructive, the perfect combination" ANTONIA FRASER. • A major new biography of the most infamous king of England by a recognized authority on the Tudors. As a youth, Henry VIII was a magnificent specimen of manhood, and in age a gargantuan wreck, but even in his prime he was never the "ladies" man" which legend, and his own imagination, created. Sexual insecurity undermined him, and gave his will that irascible edge which proved fatal to Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell alike. Henry VIII dominated England during his lifetime and for many years thereafter, as a warrior, as a renaissance Prince, and as Supreme Head of the Church, but his personality is as controversial today as it was then. Professor David Loades has spent most of his life investigating the remains, literary, archival and archaeological, of Henry VIII, and this monumental new biography book is the result. His portrait of Henry is distinctive, he was neither a genius nor a tyrant, but a man "like any other", except for the extraordinary circumstances in which he found himself.