The debate on Tudor royal propaganda has been a classic dialectic. The thesis of the 1960s was that the arts of renaissance magnificence and the power of printed persuasion awed the dynasty's subjects into compliance with their rule. The antithesis of the 1990s countered that most of the court's productions were too inaccessible or too incomprehensible to sway the man in the street. Now comes the synthesis. In one sense that term demeans Kevin Sharpe's achievement, for this book is very much more than a summary of what has gone before. He analyses projections of royal authority in a far wider range of media than any previous author, and across a wider chronological range, to argue that the representation of majesty was a vital means to Tudor power, yet one that made that power increasingly dependent on public approval. All royal communication is here, from Henry viii to Elizabeth, from pageants and portraits through clothes and jewels to printed polemic and manuscript verse. Changing contexts, such as the rising demand for print and more self-conscious appreciation of the visual arts, are well sketched in. Most important, there is throughout a sense that communication was a matter for negotiation and debate, that the Tudors could not control what people thought of them. Even those who praised the monarch might be pushing particular policies, while prophecy, rumour, sedition and satire might prove as persuasive as proclamations or progresses. Within his panorama Sharpe has certain distinctive emphases. Royal authorship and the royal body are given special weight as means to constitute power, above all for Henry and Elizabeth. The Reformation, by creating division and insecurity while equipping monarchs with the sacral aura of the supremacy, is seen as a key driver in the development of royal images and the political need to deploy them. This book, then, is a major achievement, but it is not without weaknesses. There is a scatter of small errors of fact or terminology. There are also three larger problems of interpretation and argument. All three are raised by Sharpe's treatment of Mary, the one Tudor whom he judges to have clearly lost the ‘competition for representation’. How new was the public sphere opened up, to Mary's cost, by Reformation debate, when public discussion of misgovernment and dynastic right had been rife in the fifteenth century? When evidence of popular response to events is thin, how far would the picture be changed by consideration of phenomena he neglects, such as the widespread rejoicing when Philip and Mary were thought to have had a son? And in the end, was it marketing or policies that mattered: Mary, after all, ‘cannot be charged with not understanding the rhetorics of power or the arts of representation’, yet, in his view, failed to win over national opinion because she married a foreigner and restored the Roman Church. Promised further volumes on the Stuarts will set a large agenda for future debate, but Kevin Sharpe has already given Tudor historians plenty to think about.