It is a long time since we had a fully fledged biography of Mary Queen of Scots, and this splendid new one by Antonia Fraser (Mary Queen of Scots) … is full of surprises….

[It reveals] the one thing about the Queen which had never occurred to me: not that she was a cunning Jezebel, a Catholic saint or even a romantic heroine, rather that she was in truth a dim and stupid woman, caught up in a drift of events she was incapable of understanding, let alone controlling.

She remains, of course, a legendary beauty…. She was, as Antonia Fraser points out, the Mannerist ideal of feminine perfection in the flesh, tall and willowy with reddish fair hair. This ravishing loveliness had gone by her mid-twenties, and she rapidly degenerated into a sad, matronly figure with sharp features topped by false hair…. Throughout her life she was a...