This was an engaging and highly readable account of the subject's life, though Matilda sometimes fades out and the book becomes a general history of the civil war for a time. Although there is a brief bibliography of mostly secondary sources, there are lots of examples of direct speech which are all unsourced (there are no footnotes/endnotes), some of which don't read like Medieval chroniclers' words, and I suspect a certain amount of poetic licence. There is no mention that Matilda was christened Adelaide and only renamed Matilda on her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. English King Henry I's heir William is stated here to be her twin brother, whereas other sources (e.g. Alison Weir's Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy), give his birth year as the year after Matilda. ( )