Discover a story 400 years in the making – the definitive biography of the man who dominated England in the first half of the sixteenth century

‘Engrossing’ THE TIMES

‘In this excellent study, Thomas More is reborn as a complex, absorbing man’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘[A] immersive, richly told account of life, death, faith and politics at the early Tudor court’ SPECTATOR

‘THE definitive biography of one of history’s most complex and often inscrutable characters’ NATHEN AMIN

‘Significant. Terrific. Meticulously researched. Beautifully written’ LITERARY REVIEW

Born into the English Wars of the Roses, educated in the European Renaissance, enthralled by the Age of Exploration and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More is one of the most famous – or notorious – figures in English history.

Is he a saintly scholar, the visionary author of Utopia and an inspiration for statesmen, socialists and intellectuals even today?

Or is he the stubborn zealot famously portrayed in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall?

Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England is the definitive biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning many received interpretations of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows Thomas More to have been an intellectual and political giant of his age, central to the making of modern Europe.

Based on new archival discoveries and drawing on more than a decade’s research into More’s life and work, this is a richly-told story of family, faith and politics, and a compelling portrait of a man who, more than four hundred years after his death, remains the most brilliant mind of the Renaissance.
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MORE PRAISE FOR THOMAS MORE

‘Paul has created a portrait of Thomas More that is epic, intimate and profoundly relatable to the modern reader’ LEAH REDMOND CHANG, Women’s Prize longlisted historian of Young Queens

‘Very impressive’ ALISON WEIR

‘Wonderful, riveting, subtle. Captures beautifully the life of More and the fading world he died to preserve’ WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘A proper scholarly history as well as a wonderful narrative read’ SUSANNAH LIPSCOMB

‘Paul gives us a movingly human picture of a family man, scholar, politician and, ultimately, political martyr’ ELIZABETH NORTON

Author Biography

Joanne Paul is a writer, broadcaster, consultant, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. She has written for the Cambridge University Press ‘Ideas in Context’ series, and has been widely praised for her work on Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. Her current academic project is an edition of Thomas More’s Utopia for the Oxford University Press.

Her first book for the trade, The House of Dudley was published in 2022. Thomas More: A Life was published in May 2025.