Henry V

Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just 35, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt was remembered as the acme of kingship. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship. In World War II, Henry’s victories in France were presented as exemplars for a people existentially threatened by Nazism.

As king, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses.

Dan Jones’s life of Henry V stands out for the generous amount of space it allots to the critical first 26 years of his life before he became king. Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England’s greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.