Book Group: this month's title: 'My Heart is My Own' by John Guy

"Oh! what must this bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight & myself, who was abandoned by her son, confined by her Cousin, abused, reproached & vilified by all, what must not her most noble mind have suffered when informed that Elizabeth had given orders for her Death!" In 1791, the 15-year-old Jane Austen wrote a "History of England" that's so larky, lively and utterly spirit-lifting that it ought to be available on NHS prescription. Young Jane loved Mary Queen of Scots above all, and popular - if not official - memory has often shared her heroine-worship.

John Guy's new biography of Mary, My Heart is My Own (HarperPerennial, £8.99), stiffens its defence of the young queen of France and Scotland with sensational discoveries about the forgeries that allowed Elizabeth's ministers to blacken Mary's name and then behead her. This is not just colourful narrative history but the fruit of ground-breaking research: a rich blend that won Guy the Whitbread biography award and, last week, left him runner-up for Book of the Year. Do the story and scholarship work in harmony? Does he prove that Elizabethan "spin" resembled ours? And (of course) do you finish by agreeing with Jane that there's something truly bewitching about Mary?