COMMENT TO A BOOK REVIEW IN THE GUARDIAN
“Elizabeth I by Helen
Castor review – a study in insecurity”
As a longtime admirer and the reader of many biographies of
Gloriana, I must say I do not like an expression such as "A Study in
Insecurity" in a title.
Elizabeth suffered an immense number of adverse events in
her life - from serious concerns for her own head under the reigns of both her
father and her half-sister to the terrors of the Protestant-Catholic warfare
she lived through.
And she experienced even more very unsettling events, giving
the word "insecurity" a definite place in her make-up, but I would
never feature that word in a title for a book about the greatest woman monarch
in European history and someone who found her way through the many storms which
raged through her life.
She, one way or another, overcame everything to establish a
reign of enduring importance and literally to bestow her name on the Age.
