Thomas More - Richard Marius

You know Thomas More? Don't you? That saintly man, the perfect politician, that bloke who stood by his principles and got his head chopped off by Henry VIII for the privilege? Remember him now? There was a big play and film about him in the 1960s, the veritable Man for All Seasons. Except that he wasn't. A man for all seasons, that is.

And in fact Richard Marius has done us all a favour by producing a view of Sir Thomas that is not pure hagiography. He sees Thomas as a man with a constant eye on how his contemporaries and posterity would view him. He's also a man with deep internal divisions over his religious and his secular beliefs. I couldn't help concluding that More actually boxed himself into his own corner. What to the world at large is seen as principal, to me came to appear as stubbornness and intolerance. Richard Marius allows More a complexity that others deny exists. His biography is sympathetic but critical, as all good biographies should be.

The author takes us through More's life, not by strict chronological account, but focusses in each chapter on an event or a book produced by Thomas's pen. Inevitably the focus is on the last twenty years of More's life.

This was a good read, if slightly ponderous at times. Richard Marius is clearly more than on top of his subject: he knows him inside out and has read all of Thomas More's sometimes turgid works.

ISBN: 9780753807040

Pages: 562

Trade paperback

Phoenix, 1999

Good condition; spine creased (thick book)

B104