This is the kind of study that can only be produced by someone who's spent their career studying a topic: confident in its overarching narrative and context while still highly detailed. The casual reader indeed may find this too demanding a study to make for easy reading, since for example the complicated and fragmentary nature of the contemporary source base about William the Conqueror requires David Bates to make frequent references to the comparative merits of various anonymous chroniclers. Bates is also a thoughtful historian but not an elegant prose stylist, and there are parts of this that are a bit of a slog to read. That quibble aside, this is still a fine biography and one that's about as comprehensive as it's possible to be. ( )