Everything we know about the morality and behaviour of Tudor times suggests that we would find the character of many of the people then — certainly those battling their way in the cutthroat world of the royal court — unattractive. Yet CJ Samson, in creating his detective character, the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, has found a way around this problem. The man whose deformity is often openly mocked and even causes superstitious fear — the credible genuinely believe that seeing a person so deformed will cause bad luck — is sensitive to other’s pain. He also cannot react to difficult and dangerous situations by whipping out his sword, as your average Tudor man would have done – in fact is believably a lot more like us than almost any other Tudor character might be.

Master Shardlake makes his third appearance in a novel simply entitled Sovereign – appropriately enough, since while the massive figure of Henry VIII hovered menacingly in the background in the first two novels, here he is centre stage, dominating the thoughts of everyone, even in his absence, as he leads the great Progress of the North of 1541. Still seeking to avoid becoming entangled in the intrigues of the court, Master Shardlake is lured into a delicate mission by Archbishop Cranmer. He is to protect a valuable prisoner, who knows secrets that could shake the foundations of the throne, until that prisoner can be taken to London for the hideous but calculated ministrations of the professional torturers in the Tower of London.

A man who can’t even face watching a bear-baiting, Master Shardlake is troubled by this, as he also tries to deal with the recent death of his father. Sansom develops the lawyer’s character beautifully, although he’s less sure in his handling of female characters. Here Tamasin, a young woman of the court, an orphan having to look out for herself, is central to the plot – becoming entangled, it seems to the point of marriage, with Master Shardlake’s rough clerk and oft-time bodyguard, Barak. The lawyer is understandable uncertain about her, but as we only ever see her from his point of view, she never really develops.

The physical reality of early modern life – the clothes, the smell, the severed heads on spikes above town walls – are, however, all beautifully laid out, and the detailed research behind the novel is evident in the accounts of the run-down, angry city of York — still seething after the “Pilgrimage of Grace” rebellion a few years before.

The politics of the court, its intrigues and maneouvres, are also, so far as this reader can tell, closely based on historical reality, where it is known, and the fictional additions are well-crafted. We know, of course, what is going to happen to the king’s young fifth wife, Catherine Howard, but that adds to, rather than detracts from, the suspense. And the traditional final twist at the end of the novel is beautifully done.

I complained when I reviewed the second novel in the series, Dark Fire, that Sansom’s writing style sometimes grated, and here it has definitely improved. Fewer individual words grate, and while sometimes the research shines through just a little too much, it now feels more integrated into the story.

It is perhaps just a little too early to start talking about Sansom in the same breath as the great historical novelist Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters), but he is certainly heading in that direction. But while Peters’ Brother Cadfael, created in the 20th century, lived in a neat, just-desserts world, Master Shardlake’s is altogether messier – moral and physically – suiting today’s tastes.

What does it take to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner? The individual winners are a diverse lot, but having read some of the words of Nelson Mandela and the most recent winner Muhammad Yunus, and just completed the autobiography of Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening, it seems there is one unifying factor, a clarity of vision that enables these exceptional individuals to understand their own actions, and the workings of their society. That’s combined with a certain pig-headed determination to effect change, and the courage to maintain that even in the face of death.

That makes them sound almost inhumanly perfect, but Ebadi’s book is a very human text, if unusually honest for an autobiography, for, you feel she insists on always being honest with herself. She’d be a loyal, but uncomfortable, friend – always able to see through her compatriots’ self-deceptions, and her own.

Ebadi’s tale is also that of Iran – and particularly of its women. She writes of her mother – a bright woman prevented in the 1940s from attending courage by marriage, obediently in love with her husband, yet also consumed by inner demons that emerged as paranoic fear. So it was her father who was the chief shaper of her life – and he was, she says “as unpatriarchal as could be imagined, for his time”. Crucially, he treated her and her brother as equals, to the astonishment of their servants.

It was not until I was much older that I realized how gender equality was impressed on me first and foremost at home, by example. It was only when I surveyed my own sense of place in the world from an adult perspective that I saw how my upbringing spared me from the low self-esteem and learned dependence that I observed in women reared in more traditional homes. My father’s chapioning of my independence, from the play yard to my later decision to become a judge, instilled a confidence in me that I never felt consciously, but later came to regard as my most valued inheritance.”

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A Sydney institution that was at least as responsible for my education as any university, Gleebooks, started as a rambling, dusty secondhand shop on Glebe Point Road. (It now seems to make most of its money from the new book store, although it still has a secondhand branch. It doesn’t seem as exciting as it once did, but that’s probably because I’ve changed rather than because it has.)

And now it is usefully on the web, with streaming audio of its talks by authors. One to check back on…

Hat-tip to Personal Political.