The Magna Carta is revered around the world as a founding document of Western liberty. But there is nothing lofty or magnanimous about that original document from 1215, notes Dan Jones: "For the most part the Magna Carta is dry, technical, difficult to decipher, and constitutionally obsolete.... The Magna Carta ought to be dead, defunct, and of interest only to serious scholars of the 13th century. Yet it is very much alive, one of the most hallowed documents in the constitutions of numerous countries." Also the author of The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses, Jones gives us a lively, action-packed history of how the Magna Carta began and how it has come to be.