Women have been great purveyors of historical novels, but [Mary, Queen of Scots] is emphatically not one of them. Everything in it is carefully documented, and what is romantic in the story stands out more effectively because the handling is always realistic and critical, imagination working on facts instead of on fantasies. Sources of information about Mary are numerous, and if few new ones have been found, or are likely to be found, the known ones have been meticulously used. It is typical of the author's thoroughness to have had a search made in the Vatican archives for a document probably non-existent. There are many sorts of history, on the other hand, and it may come more instinctively to women, denizens of the narrow intense aquarium of the family, to see it as a conflict of individual wills and destinies rather than of mass forces and Antonia (Pakenham...