This is not Henry Kamen's first book on El Escorial and its founder, Philip ii. He has already published Philip of Spain, also with Yale University Press, and (he admits) ‘At several points, I have drawn substantially on relevant material presented in my 1997 biography, so that this book is in some sense a continuation of that one.’ Furthermore, in 2009 he published El enigma del Escorial: el sueño de un rey, which is virtually identical to the work under review (except that it contains the originals of all Spanish quotations). Kamen presents his material on San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial – monastery, palace, mausoleum, library and seminary in one – in nine chapters. The first three study its origins; five more discuss how Philip envisaged his creation and how he oversaw its construction; and an epilogue describes its subsequent fate. The book is filled with striking details, such as the fact that the six huge paintings by Lucas Cambiaso celebrating the Christian victory at Lepanto presently in the monastery were not commissioned by Philip but acquired at the public auction of the goods of his disgraced secretary Antonio Pérez (p. 191 and plate 22); that the entire complex was left vacant with its windows smashed for several years after 1836, when the Spanish government suppressed all religious orders and confiscated their property; and that it was abandoned again in 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, when sixty-eight of its monks were taken away and shot (pp. 228–9). This is a polemical book: Kamen condemns many other scholars who have written on his subject. An assertion by Catherine Wilkinson ‘does not seem plausible’ (pp. 254–5 n. 23); ‘it is obvious that [Juan Rafael de la] Cuadra Blanco's thesis rests wholly on hypothesis and is unsupported by virtually any solid fact’ (p. 260 n. 48); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra advances ‘an impossibly wide-ranging argument’ (p. 261 n. 53); while ‘It would be interesting to discover where’ Carmelo Lisón Tolosana obtained the ‘wholly fictitious image’ of Philip, ‘dressed always in black, walking slowly and solemnly’ (p. 264 n. 15); and so on. Yet, like all historians, Kamen too makes mistakes. Thus his discussion of ‘The Escorial and royal absolutism’, a relationship that he claims other scholars have misunderstood, includes the assertion that the king only referred to ‘my absolute power’ (‘mi poderío absoluto’) in his last will and testament. Otherwise, ‘He did not use the phrase during his reign’ (p. 170). (His Spanish text is even more categorical: ‘Nunca usó la frase durante su reinado’: p. 214.) This is wrong. To give three examples: in 1557 the king authorised ministers to conclude an alliance in his name ‘de nuestro propio motu, cierta ciencia, y poderío real absoluto’; in 1574, when he sought to raise money by selling royal demesne land, and potential purchasers objected that the Laws of Castile prohibited such alienation and so might later be invoked to invalidate the transaction, the king guaranteed their permanent exemption from the relevant laws because ‘mi determinada voluntad es que ansí se haga y si necessario es de poderío real absoluto’; and a few years later, when an official condemned by the inquisitors of Murcia asked the king to override their verdict that he could never ‘hold public office again’, Philip did so ‘de mi propio motu y cierta ciencia y poderio real absoluto’. (For these and other examples of the king's use of this phrase see Geoffrey Parker, Felipe II: la biografía definitiva, Madrid 2010, ch. xvii.) Here and elsewhere, Kamen's eagerness to score polemical points detracts from his otherwise interesting and valuable study of what the king's contemporaries came to call – not without reason – ‘the Eighth Wonder of the World’.