SOURCE: "A Discordant Queen," in New York Review of Books, November 6, 1969, pp. 40-42.

In the following review, Kenyon presents an informed account of the history of Mary Queen of Scots and the political environment of the time, while commenting on Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots and comparing it to the work of other historians.

Lady Antonia Fraser is young, beautiful, and rich, an earl's daughter married to a busy and successful politician, the mother of a large family; yet she has surmounted all these handicaps to authorship to produce a first-rate historical biography. I do not mean to sound sarcastic or patronizing. Only a practicing historian knows the hours of boring and backbreaking labor that go into a book like this; and in a well-trampled field like the life of Mary Stuart the burden of such labor is not lightened by the hope of some exciting find.

It...