How many swords had Henry VIII?

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Alison Weir, described in her blurb as "our most readable and stimulating popular historian of Tudor England", makes a living from writing Tudor history. Having worked her way through Henry VIII's children and Henry VIII's wives, she has now taken on the man himself.

The result, Henry VIII: King and Court, is an undemanding read, its bitesize chapters easily digestible, its style light and fluent, its illustrations colourful and well chosen. Weir delivers what her introduction promises. She sets her scene, Henry's spectacular court, and then gives a detailed chronicle of his life, full of anecdote and circumstance. Along the way, she introduces us to the people among whom Henry lived, and takes us on guided tours of his palaces, with masses of detail on Tudor fashion, jewellery, perfumes, furniture, decoration, cookery and sports.

At times, the book reads like a fantasy concept-TV show - when Changing Rooms and Through the Keyhole met Henry VIII at the Antiques Roadshow. And this approach does give us an insight into the king. Henry VIII was a material boy: he liked things, nice things. His conspicuous consumption was not far from our consumer culture. This book is Henry VIII for the lifestyle generation. If that were the limit of the book's aspirations, one might be able to recommend it more warmly. But the blurb promises more, much more. This is a "comprehensive analytical study", written from a "new perspective", advancing "controversial new conclusions" and intended to appeal alike "to the general reader and the serious historian". Well, the "new perspective" is that provided by Henry's "magnificent court" and his "sumptuous palaces". New, then, only to the extent that we have not already viewed it in the works of David Starkey, Simon Thurley and David Loades - to which, to be fair, Alison Weir acknowledges her indebtedness.

The "controversial new conclusions" are hard to spot, except for the claim that Anne Boleyn was once again pregnant when she fell from the king's favour at the end of April 1536. The evidence (some royal communiqu?s intended for foreign consumption) is scanty and requires purposeful interpretation. It is not impossible. Anne had miscarried on 29 January, so she could have been pregnant again within three months, though it does not seem likely. But if Henry really had thought that Anne was pregnant, he would have been far less receptive to the charges of adultery which brought her down. Serious historians will not be convinced.

In keeping with its academic pretensions, the book comes arrayed in all the panoply of scholarship: an ample bibliography and 60 pages of footnotes. Yet the bibliography misses much important recent work, work which might have saved her from sundry errors of fact or interpretation, as well as adding depth to her rather two-dimensional political analysis. To give just one example, Diarmaid MacCulloch's award-winning life of Thomas Cranmer might have been considered worthy of mention even by a popular historian. It would certainly have saved her from the naive assumption that Cranmer was a timid scholar dragged, despite himself, out of his ivory tower into a public career.

The footnotes are a waste of space, all 60 pages of them. Footnotes are meant to give scholars the chance to check out an author's sources (Weir tends to use her sources somewhat uncritically). These notes don't help much, as they never give page numbers for the books cited. Nor does Weir always give us footnotes when she should: for instance, to support the questionable claim that Henry went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas ? Becket at Canterbury in 1537. (Intriguing but implausible: he closed the shrine the next year.) And the footnotes we do get can be misleading. For example, having cited a comment made about the Field of Cloth of Gold by one of Henry's bishops, John Fisher, Weir refers us to the Victorian edition of Fisher's sermons. Reasonable enough - except that the sermon in question does not appear in that edition. Popular history doesn't need footnotes. And footnotes like these will not turn popular history into something more substantial.

Alison Weir's books are found in all the public libraries. She knows her market, and no doubt this book will be as successful as her others. It will appeal to the general reader, who will find it stuffed with interesting things. Henry had 94 swords, apparently. But until David Starkey completes his biography of Henry VIII, serious historians will stick to Jack Scarisbrick's classic study, still in print after more than 30 years.