Mary can do no wrong! - Rated 
In a sense this book is a terrific read! Yet it is also extremely biased in favour of Mary of Scotland, which makes the reading somewhat unpleasant! The book contains an enormous amount of detail, which is valuable as a sort of reference work. It is the presentation of this detail that is annoying: it has quite a bit of kitsch to it and is very selective (pro-Mary). Fraser often tries to explain away things, like her desire to make out of the five-month pregnancy a five-week one (so that Mary and Bothwell don't have to have sex before there marriage). This nonsense has been adequately dealt with in later books. The saintly Mary...Elizabeth of England is seen much more realistically. That, certainly, is a good point of the book. However, to compare the murder of Darnley with the "suspicious death" of Amy Robsart (wife of Elizabeth's lover, Lord Robert Dudley) is breathtakenly brazen! Darnley was killed after all, the only uncertainty being by whom. Lady Amy fell down the stairs. No modern historian or contemporary with inside-knowledge believes/believed earnestly in murder. Comparisons on this line do a book no service to gain credibility with the reader.
Opinionated - Rated
A very well researched book which covers Mary's entire life. However, the author is so in love with her subject that she continually presents her own opinion as fact and tries to present Mary in a continually positive light. This occurs so often throughout the book that I found it extremely distracting and annoying. If I had a drink for every time she did this, I would have been drunk by page 20.
I'm not sure if I would recommend this book. I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected and was disappointed.
Mary Queen of Scots: Fabulous at Forty - Rated 
Mary Queen Of Scots The first time I read this book was in 1973 when I was 16 years old. I was enthralled with Mary's story and read this book several times over the years along with every other biography of her I could find. I still find Antonia Fraser's bio to be the best. I thought it meticulously researched and very "readable." I loved it when I was a teenager and I still love it now...
Several years ago a company called Papillion Creations produced a Mary Queen of Scots sampler chart (still in print at this time)that I stitched because of my passion for anything related to her, it is a version of this sampler that is pictured on the cover of this 40th anniversary edition.
Martyrology, not biography. - Rated 
I really wish I could like this book. I am fascinated by this historical period and I was eager to read this biography and at the beginning I really liked. However the book is way to biased to be a really useful reading: Mary is described as an icon, not as a woman, every achievement of her life being due to her saintly goodness and every failure (many) to her judgement being momentarily impaired by sickness or bad counseling. All of this would have been acceptable if some of the "different views" on Mary's disastrous life and political career had been examined at some length, giving a more objective portrait of her, but as it is the book is only a good read if you have already formed a religious opinion that she was a faultless saint and you want to read at length of how unjustly misused she was.
the complete life of Mary Stuart. - Rated
One or two reviewers down: Wasn't Mary thee times a widow? Bothwell died before her too, I seem to recall. Quite horribly, too: he was locked up in a dungeon in some castle in Denmark. He was held there, chained to a stone pillar, for ten years. In that time nobody spoke to him (his wardens were expressly forbidden to do so) and his food and drink was brought through a small trap door. After a few years he was a raving lunatic and after that, for the last two to three years he was there, completely catatonic. When he hadn't touched his food for two weeks, they looked in on him and found his dead body clothed in scraps and rags, covered in filth, sores and vermin. He had starved to death. The odd thing is, and it is quite touching too in a way, is that after his death his body was taken out of his cell and was cleaned up, washed, shaved, embalmed and dressed in finery befitting a man of his station. He was given decent christian burial. Why the King of Denmark had treated him so badly in life is not known, nor why he was decently laid out and buried after his death. After Mary's flight to England in 1568 Bothwell is never mentioned again in many books, which is odd: the tragic story of his captivity and death marks a poignant and moving epilogue to their marriage. Nine years after him, Mary would die.
We know she knew Bothwell died, but was she ever told how horrible his end had been....I wonder. This is very good book. Read it and get aquainted with Mary Stuart and her troubled life and times. O and Darnley was a stupid pr*ck, a nasty egocentric spoilt little toff who was a willing if useless pawn in the schemes and intrigues of his ghastly and over-ambitious parents. Bothwell was a hundred times the man Darnley was, Oh Mary Stuart, Oh James Bothwell: why dinnea ye two hi yesel' tae Holland or Flanders, or tae France even, and live happily ever after... Instead of which bliss it was a stone pillar that did for the one, and three strokes of an axe for the other. Sic transit...
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