Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King

"Dan Jones’s book is risky, in a way, because he writes in the present tense as a way of trying to make it more immediate. Again, it’s written in the shadow of Shakespeare. That version of Henry V brings in Falstaff and roistering youth, and belatedly realising the seriousness of what inheritance has presented to you. Dan Jones would have very little patience with the Shakespearean view of Henry V. Henry’s reign, though so influential—especially in terms of the wars in France, Agincourt, everything like that—was very short. He died very young. So what Dan Jones has done is concentrate on the first decades of his life, before he succeeds his father, showing how he positioned himself, how he trained himself, and how his various competencies were worked into a certain kind of authority. He displayed a real ruthlessness, both in using people and manoeuvring his position. At a certain point, he even seems to have been in opposition to his own father. The king himself, of course, supplanted Richard II, as surveyed in Helen Castor’s book. So it’s a very different figure to the Shakespearean Henry. In the end, we see somebody involved in a pattern of ruthless power play from his early boyhood. And what’s surprising is how much evidence there is to sustain this. It’s an imaginative and arresting book by somebody writing from a rather different vantage point than some of the other entrants on the list. Another thing this prize has always tried to do is take a pretty catholic attitude to style and approach and voice, if I can put it that way, as well as looking at books written very much from the traditional angle of the historian-biographer. We are open to looking at books that try to adopt a different voice—in this case, the sometimes almost breathless present tense, which grabs you by the scruff of your neck. We think, by and large, it’s worked pretty well. I think that’s true. If I could revert to something I was saying earlier about the distinction between historical biography and literary biography, I think that’s especially the case in literary biography. I wrote a large, two-volume authorised life of W.B. Yeats. Yeats wrote his own so-called autobiographies, which are wonderful works of fiction, and almost spectacularly unreliable. Many writers do this, sometimes deliberately to fox the trail for people who follow—and Henry James is an example here—to highlight the parts of their life that they want emphasised, like their education. I think this is more of a danger with literary biographies. A good example, actually, is Muriel Spark, who wrote, again, a very misleading autobiography, deliberately to throw people off the scent. Frances Wilson, who has just finished a book about Muriel Spark, was very much up against that. And Frances Wilson is someone who has won the Longford Prize for a historical biography, as I said. Individual biographers can move between the two genres. There are different challenges, I think. I myself wrote historical biographies of Charles Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill, and there were different challenges, I think, to my work on Yeats, because neither Churchill nor Parnell wrote anything like an autobiography. They didn’t have, or didn’t use, the weapons of the misleading autobiography, which is a genre for creative writers."