SOURCE: "A Good Crumb," in History Today, Vol. 44, No. 11, November, 1994, p. 60.

In the following review, Ives assesses the strengths and failings of Fraser's approach to writing history as evidenced in The Wives of Henry VIII.

That Antonia Fraser's Six Wives of Henry VIII is available in paperback as well as on library shelves should guarantee circulation to the only current account of Henry VIII's wives and by far the best of its kind. It has all the Fraser virtues: liveliness, enough but not too much detail, a grasp of up-to-date scholarship and an eye for the memorable—I shall treasure St Bernadino of Siena's remark that the mother who fails to tell her daughter what to expect on her wedding night 'sends her to sea with no biscuit'. Above all imaginative sympathy; the past lives as is too rarely the case in academic history today. After half-a-century Eileen...