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Free Thinking hosts the six short-listed authors for this year’s Wolfson Prize for the best historical writing and research. Three biographers are on the list: Lyndal Roper with a study of Martin Luther’s intellectual development in the 16th century, Chris Given-Wilson on the uneasily crowned head of Henry IV who usurped the throne from his cousin Richard II at the end of the fourteenth century and Matthew Strickland’s portrait of the life and times of Henry the Young King, the son of Henry II who sat alongside his father but never actually ruled England in the 12th century. As Matthew Strickland tells Rana Mitter, it was during the Young King’s reign that the lines began to be drawn in a long struggle between sacral and secular powers in Europe