I arrived at this volume rather randomly, and picked it up to read likewise, being familiar with the name Eleanor of Aquitaine and being aware that it was evocative of... something, but I couldn't really remember what. About halfway through, I realised I was thinking primarily of a childhood Christmas viewing of The Lion In Winter, so yay for nostalgia. Anyway, Eleanor's story puts her dead centre at the pulsing heart of the formation of Europe, for all that as a person she ends up sidelined a lot. Even when at her most powerful and effective as a personage, it's the other, male actors who are running around fighting and redrawing the map every month or so. This sidelining is a function of her femaleness in a male world, and it also tends to get her written out of a lot of histories, but still, if this was really her life, as opposed to the Rise of the Plantagenets, we'd know more about what she was doing and where she was living. Instead, An empire forms consolidates, rocks with internecine, not to say legendary, family squabbling, and ultimately falls apart and Eleanor's life is revealed only where she intersects with it. But she intersects a lot, and the story of Henry the Second and his wife and sons and Richard and John and warfare and crusades and marriages and annulments is a blazing, torrid epic. 'Every family has its ups and downs,' as Katharine Hepburn is wont to say.