The author charts the journey of the woman who has become one of history’s most iconic femmes fatales. – acknowledging her own “obsession”.  She expresses indignation / frustration at the way her subject has been misrepresented and maligned. In fact, she decries authors and historians who, she says, mix fact and fantasy in lurid accounts e.g the television historian David Starkey, who calls himself a “self-confessed, all-purpose media tart”; Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl,doesn’t apply the historical rigour she lays clain to and Mantel, (Bring up the Bodies writes well but presents an “old, one-sided, extremist view of Boleyn” as a wily “schemer”.