Thomas More: A Life
A worthy addition ... This book beautifully captures both the life of a fascinating man and the fading world that he died trying to preserve ... Ms. Paul skillfully conveys the stakes of More’s struggle ... Ms. Paul narrates the story’s denouement in riveting detail. Her account achieves poignancy by generously quoting the letters and works of spiritual consolation that More composed during his trials ... Ms. Paul’s portrait is sympathetic, but not hagiographic. Her book is a subtle effort to explore the great paradox of Thomas More ... Mantel’s malicious portrait perhaps speaks for a cynical, postreligious age, suspicious of believers and doubtful of foundational truth claims.
Joanne Paul has chosen to tell a more compassionate story about More, and about the fear, violence and cataclysmic, nation-defining politics of the English Reformation. She is well placed to do so ... To show us More as other than saint or villain, her new, hugely readable biography immerses us in More’s busy, messy and changing world. Paul is brilliant at bringing the swirl of Catholic England to life ... She is strong when she writes about London ... Paul succeeds in making More knowable, familiar even ... More does not need to be invoked as a man for our times, just as he does not need to be either saintly or monstrous. As Paul’s engrossing biography more than shows, More and his world are compelling, strange and dark enough on their own.
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Absorbing and deeply researched ... Paul is excellent on the development of his ideas, though More himself—like his most famous book—remains difficult to 'see' as a coherent whole ... Moving and resonant.
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