Signposts the Tudors.

The 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession is the perfect opportunity to take stock of Tudor history. What is considered important has changed dramatically. In the 1960s, when Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons about Sir Thomas More triumphed at the Oscars but scholars still shunned the media limelight, historians studied narrowly-based political and constitutional topics, for example Geoffrey Elton in his Tudor Revolution in Government (1953). The exception, working against the grain in an older narrative tradition, was Jack Scarisbrick, whose Henry VIII (1968) is a brilliant biography of a tyrant-king that has yet to be surpassed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]