The Life of Thomas More
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Narrated by:
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Frederick Davidson
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By:
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Peter Ackroyd
About this listen
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Critic reviews
"When one finishes the book, one has the sense that not only does Ackroyd know all the available facts about More and his milieu, he knows More himself....[A] masterly new biography. It must be a candidate for book of the year." (The Observer)
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Story
Since the 16th century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king's insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540. After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry's mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell.
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Not about the Tudors
- By J.Brock on 09-18-19
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The Year of Lear
- Shakespeare in 1606
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
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Detailed and satisfying
- By Tad Davis on 02-24-16
By: James Shapiro
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Our Oriental Heritage
- The Story of Civilization, Volume 1
- By: Will Durant
- Narrated by: Robin Field
- Length: 50 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume I chronicles the early history of Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia.
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Wonderful
- By Michael on 11-30-13
By: Will Durant
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Mary Queen of Scots
- By: Antonia Fraser
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 25 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Her royal birth gave her claim to the thrones of two nations; her marriage to the young French dauphin promised to place a third glorious crown on her noble head. Instead, Mary Stuart became the victim of her own impulsive heart, scandalizing her world with a foolish passion that would lead to abduction, rape, and even murder. Here is her story, a queen who lost a throne for love, a monarch pampered and adored even as she was led to her beheading, the unforgettable woman who became a legend for all time.
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Shockingly disingenuous.
- By rainjade on 08-14-18
By: Antonia Fraser
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Shakespeare and the Resistance
- By: Clare Asquith
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1590s were bleak years for England. The queen was old, the succession unclear, and the treasury empty after decades of war. Amid the rising tension, William Shakespeare published a pair of poems dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. Although wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, to modern readers both works are almost impenetrable. But in her enthralling new book, the Shakespearean scholar Clare Asquith reveals their hidden contents.
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Excellent scholarship unveiling hidden history
- By Lumen Fidei on 07-03-23
By: Clare Asquith
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Charlemagne
- By: Johannes Fried, Peter Lewis
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 30 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When the legendary Frankish king and emperor Charlemagne died in 814 he left behind a dominion and a legacy unlike anything seen in Western Europe since the fall of Rome. Johannes Fried paints a compelling portrait of a devout ruler, a violent time, and a unified kingdom that deepens our understanding of the man often called the father of Europe.
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I really wanted to enjoy this -
- By Doris on 01-19-18
By: Johannes Fried, and others
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Shakespeare by Another Name
- The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man who Was Shakespeare
- By: Mark Anderson
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Abridged
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Actor William Shaksper of Stratford had little education, never left England, and apparently owned no books. How could he have written the great plays and poetry attributed to him? Journalist Mark Anderson's biography offers tantalizing proof that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, courtier, spendthrift, scholar, traveler, soldier, scoundrel, and writer, was the real "Shakespeare".
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Brings the period to life
- By Dan on 01-15-06
By: Mark Anderson
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Young and Damned and Fair
- The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII
- By: Mr. Gareth Russell
- Narrated by: Jenny Funnell
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Written with an exciting combination of narrative flair and historical authority, this interpretation of the tragic life of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, breaks new ground in our understanding of the very young woman who became queen at a time of unprecedented social and political tension and whose terrible errors in judgment quickly led her to the executioner's block.
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Magnifent scholarly work
- By Linda Erlich on 08-08-17
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Augustine
- Conversions to Confessions
- By: Robin Lane Fox
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Saint Augustine is one of the most influential figures in all of Christianity, yet his path to sainthood was by no means assured. Born in AD 354 to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine spent the first 30 years of his life struggling to understand the nature of God and his world. He learned about Christianity as a child but was never baptized, choosing instead to immerse himself in the study of rhetoric, Manicheanism, and then Neoplatonism - all the while indulging in a life of lust and greed.
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Excellent
- By Chelsie P. on 12-06-16
By: Robin Lane Fox
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The Fall of Anne Boleyn
- A Countdown
- By: Claire Ridgway
- Narrated by: Claire Ridgway
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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During the spring of 1536 in Tudor England, events conspire to bring down Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England. The coup against the Queen results in the brutal executions of six innocent people - Anne Boleyn herself, her brother, and four courtiers - and the rise of a new Queen. Drawing on 16th-century letters, eye witness accounts, and chronicles, Claire Ridgway leads the listener through the sequence of chilling events one day at a time, telling the true story of Anne Boleyn's fall.
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Fascinating, well researched, and great narration.
- By Katherine K. Carlisle on 01-19-16
By: Claire Ridgway
What listeners say about The Life of Thomas More
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ron L. Caldwell
- 12-11-10
Extraordinary cautionary tale
It would be hard to overestimate the level of fascination Thomas More continues to generate. I found him at times completely medieval in outlook and at other times thoroughly modern. His particular faith was the least compelling thing about him from my point of view, though the interaction of his beliefs with those of Henry VIII set the stage for More's greatest hour: his silence in the face of lengthy persecution, and his pungent revelation of his views in the moments after his conviction. More's life and mind are worth our time.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Jonathan R. Zeko
- 07-02-16
A very important biography
I hesitated in purchasing this book at first because one of the reviewers was critical of the narration. I thought the narrator did a very good job with a proper British accent, and while his pace seemed a little slow at first, it was necessary given the length of the book and the need to explain the type of English spoken during the relevant period and that there were Latin phrases.
Sir Thomas More needs no introduction. I enjoyed hearing about his life because it gave me insight to how people lived 500 years ago. As a lawyer, it was interesting to learn how lawyers practiced law 500 years ago.
Perhaps the most important thing to take away from the book is that the abuses of power in those days form the basis of why our founding fathers prepared a written constitution.
While I recommend a book unconditionally, I will warn you that you have to be patient in listening to it because it is a rather long work. But, it needs to be because the subject of the biography was an accomplished person and prolific writer.
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2 people found this helpful
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- S. Marshall Priddy
- 05-21-18
One of the hardest audiobooks I've ever finished
This book was a slog in just about every way. I wanted to like this, I'm very interested in the subject, but this book just failed on multiple fronts.
To start I really must note how much I dislike the narrator's style. I expect at any moment for him to get a call asking for Abe Froman, "the sausage king of Chicago," while commenting that he weeps for the future. It is a terribly affected snooty English accent that is a major distraction to following the actual content, and it almost never gets any easier. He also has a really annoying habit of taking the passages that the author quotes in early Modern English, and trying to pronounce them with affected phonetics to give you a sense of the weird spelling used. All it does is make it virtually impossible to understand, and anyone being sensible would just read the word that a listener will understand.
I made a point of purging many titles from my wish list that had him as a narrator, and I'd love to see a number of his works redone by better narrators.
As to the content, again this was a struggle. I felt that a lot of this book was just "one danged thing after another" with little narrative or analysis. I'd just finished Massing's excellent audiobook Fatal Discord (about Erasmus and Luther), and I felt like much of the more interesting things about More came out there and not here.
To make a very specific complaint representative of the larger problem, there's a point where this book mentions More trying to stop Tyndale's bible from making it to England. Without Massing's book, this would have made absolutely no sense. You really cannot do justice to this need unless you put it in context of the 1525 Peasant's Revolt in Germany. Ackroyd barely touches that, instead lumping it in with his blaming Protestants for "the plague and the abhorrent violence of the Peasants' revolt in Germany, as well as the sack of Rome." Starting with the plague—which no modern reader would hold as credible—shows that he's essentially just calling it all divine wrath. The larger analysis, that the Revolt really did cause a great deal of damage and really was inflamed by unrestrained passions let loose, fall completely out of the analysis, totally unremarked. Actual context is just dropped.
Additionally there's the matter of the Richard Hunne debacle, where a man is essentially charged of heresy and either murdered or committed suicide in prison for an initial charge from the church of refusing to give his dead son's christening robe as a ceremonial mortuary gift to the clergy. This is full of really remarkable insights into the time and place, potentially; that potential is not tapped. No good explanation is ever actually given, and the whole thing is a sideshow that raises more questions than it actually answers.
The book gets better in the last quarter when we get to his defiance of Henry VIII and his eventual martyrdom. It feels like this was written first, with Ackroyd then taking all of his assembled notes for the beginning several decades of More's life and just writes down all of their content in chronological order with no real narrative. There's a brief discussion of Utopia, and I credit this for providing an insight into the work as satire. I re-listened to Utopia following my completion of this, and was better able to understand all of that. But the discussion was far too short, and lacked a really thorough discussion of that satire, it's true aims, and how much of an idealist More actually was; More's closing remarks on that work do state that he didn't agree with all of it, and I'd have liked to see a better breakdown of how far More was an idealist (given the new tracts of his friend Erasmus Against War coupled with Wolsey's aim to essentially create the first proto-UN/proto-EU grand alliance). Knowing more about More's character, there are clearly parts where I can see disagreement (hard to imagine an endorsement of freedom of religion from someone who literally persecuted and executed heretics), but for much of the content determining his aims remains untouched. That's a shame, because that was one of my primary goals in listening to this book.
Another goal had been to get a better sense of the More/Cromwell rivalry at the center of the miniseries Wolf Hall, but this is left almost completely untouched. That may well be because the main thesis of that series is fictitious (I know Simon Schama felt it to be terribly revisionist), but if you're looking into insight into that character, you won't find it here.
As a final point, I've listened to one other Ackroyd title (Rebellion) and the problems I see in this book weren't present there. I definitely feel like I retained less than I'd have liked, but there is at least a real narration and nice supporting side stories for other characters like Milton and Hobbes. This book just really didn't meet the expectations that other book had set. More remains an interesting and important figure, but this book gave me very little of what I was actually seeking.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-17-21
beautiful composition and excellent reading.
I was inspired. I became interested in Thomas More's life because of his historic significance, and the intimations I have had of his virtue and moral excellence. I was not disappointed. This biography does Ann excellent job of presenting the facts of his life in an engaging and honest way. It does a good job of identifying what is verified and what is not. The reader was also very good. He was clearly a highly trained voice and did nothing too distract from the power of the book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- David
- 05-24-22
Great
Henry VIII’s total domination of people’s lives should be familiar to the victims of totalitarianism in the 20th and 21st century.
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- Con
- 06-28-24
A Man For All Seasons
It's a well written, performed, and detailed account of a man of utmost principle.
While we in the modern era, or those of a non-catholic persuasion, may take issue with his great distaste for Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation this account (I think) does an excellent job of "putting his case", as More might have said, for why the destruction of the Catholic Church in England and the nakedly political ambitions of Henry VIII's divorce of Catherine of Aragon should have been rightly resisted.
As with many other political men of various times the Socrates', Catos, and Mores shine brightly as emblems of virtue and moral character across the centuries while the Meletus/Anytus, Caesers, and Henry VIIIs forever earn our derision.
Whilst not perfect men, the manner in which they lived their lives continues to offer valuable insights to us all all these years later.
Would recommend! If you're unsure of this book, watch the wonderful film version of More's life titled "A Man For All Seasons" to gauge your appetite for this biography - available for free on YouTube.
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- Andy
- 09-05-13
Great Man
Would you consider the audio edition of The Life of Thomas More to be better than the print version?
No, but it came close
What did you like best about this story?
I loved the latin and the links between the past, his life and where we are today. I really am seeing how we got from there to here.
Have you listened to any of Frederick Davidson’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
There were several instances that were poignant and moving. When his head was cut of and boiled, had me in tears. I was also moved by the death of his first wife, his imprisonment and his service to the poor.
Any additional comments?
I could listen to this book again and again and learn something every time!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Patrick E. Delaney
- 11-15-23
The only good lawyer
While there were parts of the book that were tedious on the whole it was very interesting and very well performed. It clearly showed one man's courage and faithfulness and living in the current time when expediency and pragmatism prevails it makes one long for honest men like St. Thomas More.
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- Andrea newton
- 11-20-24
I like Moore less now
Perhaps it’s the narrator’s voice or perhaps it’s Moore’s sarcastic and derogatory humor but I find the book difficult to listen to and his life not impressive at all.
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- Kindle Customer
- 04-23-17
interesting story, no so good narrator
Fascinating time in history. The author makes the time come alive. Narration was flat and hard to listen to. I have heard train arrivals read with more expression.
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