The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson

The Elizabethans

With The Elizabethans, A.N. Wilson returns to his winning formula of a single-volume work in which he aims to paint "a portrait of an age". Like The Victorians, it's not exactly narrative history but still includes all the best anecdotes, while the gaps are filled with some broad-brush social background. Wilson retains his eye for amusing detail and at the same time skates impressively over swathes of intellectual history.

It's easy to digest and it's stirring stuff.

There's much to relish in his succinct accounts of the adventure of the Armada, of Queen Elizabeth's romance with Robert Dudley, or of Drake's circumnavigation of the world. The grandeur of Elizabethan poetry, violent religious conflict, and the colourful teeming squalor of London are all brought to life. We have Walsingham intriguing with his spies, Essex providing a petulant late-life love interest for the queen, and assorted humanists beavering nobly away to bring the Renaissance to this rainy island.

But The Elizabethans is also very clearly a book about A.N. Wilson himself: opinionated, idiosyncratic, sniping waspishly at the world of today. The previous historians with whom he really engages include A.L. Rowse and (obscurely) Evelyn Waugh. Historians from the past 50 years, "liberal" historians, "post-imperial" historians, "revisionist" historians and (perhaps worst of all) historians of "gender studies" get little of a look-in apart from when their views are rejected.

Yes, the Elizabethans held regrettable views on slavery, and on the treatment of Irish people, Wilson argues, but old-school historians like Rowse nevertheless painted them in colours "clearer than those, more recent, who wish to arraign them for their crimes".

All this anti-modernity gets a little tedious.

It's also the book, to use Wilson's own archaic phrase, of an "Eng. Lit. don". He goes into raptures about Spenser, while visual artists such as Nicholas Hilliard are hardly mentioned. One of the few paintings described is a portrait of Elizabeth, which is seen as being "alive with intelligence", and possessing "immediately recognisable Welsh features". Even setting aside the vexed question of what Welsh people look like, those pesky "revisionist" historians recognise that it's treacherous to treat Tudor portraiture as if it provides a photograph of its sitter.

There's plenty on religion, but the chapter entitled Elizabethan Women really only tells the story of one woman, the atypical Bess of Hardwick (and the second half of the chapter is rather bizarrely devoted to heraldry). Monogamy "must have been practised by some Elizabethans", we hear, "but one does not derive the impression from their writings that such conditions of life were the norm". Well, normal Elizabethans couldn't write.

And yet, if that semi-mythical being "the general reader" really exists, I believe that he or she won't mind any of this at all. The Elizabethans remains a wide-ranging and readable introduction to the high culture of the age (though the language doesn't always reach Shakespearian standards: marriages "hit the rocks" and people have "a hotline" to the queen, or undergo the odd "baptism by fire").

In a revealing sentence, A.N. Wilson believes that Hardwick Hall, that masterpiece of Elizabethan architecture, invites us to return to a "world where there was no ugliness, where no factory manufactured clothes or furniture, where life was a ceremony of beautiful clothes, beautiful objects and considered shapes and shades".

If this is how you like to imagine the past - and plenty of people do - then this is just the book for you.

Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces and author of If Walls Could Talk.