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Rating: 
Summary: Incoherent, garbled and convoluted
Review: Lee scatters material across the pages with little regard for the book he's writing and its title, and no thought whatsoever for the supposed structure of the book. At any point, he is likely to digress into a confused and confusing family history of a minor player in the saga for no detectable reason. Not the slightest attempt has been made to edit his rambling style or apply rules of grammar, punctuation, or consistency. The result is a book that is actually unreadable, with its only saving grace being the generous quoting of contemporary sources.
At times, Lee patronizes his readers: carefully explaining to us that mobile telephones didn't exist in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for example, and repeatedly emphasising this sort of nonsense. At other times, he breezily assumes we possess arcane knowledge about the tangled family histories of English political dynasties that no lay reader of any nationality or background would be casually acquainted with.
Despite the powerful simplicity of its title and the seeming clarity of its purported subject, "1603" has no raison d'etre, no sense of itself or what Lee is trying to achieve. "This is not the place for a biography of James I", Lee tells us a quarter-way through, after discussing James's childhood, education and upbringing at some discursive length and before continuing through his young adulthood, marriage and accession to the English throne. What the book *is* the place for, Lee has no idea.
Rating: 
Summary: More confusing than interesting
Review: Popular history dedicated to a single year often proves a very successful approach. It allows the author to make complementary explorations of developments in various areas, be those geographies, cultures, and/or ideas. (John Wills' "1688: A Global History" was a particularly successful example of the genre.) Christopher Lee's book about 1603 - limited mostly to Great Britain - is not so successful. The audience for this book will be largely those already familiar with British history, geography, and current idiom. I thought I had a reasonably good grasp of the genealogy of the British kings and queens leading up to 1603; my grasp loosened considerably after reading Lee's attempt to clarify the lineages. My alienation was reinforced by the frequency of phrases such as "as we know" and "of course" when the author deals with facts that non-British readers are unlikely to know or to treat as a matter of course. ("Lady Jane Grey ... was, of course, Warwick's own daughter-in-law.") And isn't the author overly fond of the rhetorical question? (Examples abound, such as: "The Jesuits?" and "What of James in all this?") Lee's main organizing principle is that of proving that 1603 was an important year in history. Although he cites one historian with an opposing view, the question strikes me as neither controversial nor deep. And without that, the text, like the subtitle, proves to be just a stringing together of topics. Some of these topics are compelling, but too many aren't. A chapter on piracy works. One on King James' coronation is interminably dull. There are numerous historical nuggets and oddities to be mined here. But the excavation effort proved too strenuous for this reader.
Rating:
Summary: Rating Based On My Limited Background
Review: The year 1603 was a busy year in England, and author Christopher Lee has provided us with a rather in-depth account of the happenings that took place. Beginning with the death of Queen Elizabeth I which brought the rise of James VI of Scotland who became King James I of England, Lee brings the reader through other events that were taking place during this time, namely the return of the plague which reared its ugly head periodically to wipe out thousands of people, piracy on the seas, William Shakespeare and his plays, and witchcraft which already at that time was an old superstition. Almost half of the book's 356 pages deal with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the rise of King James. My background in this subject matter is negligible, so I base my rating on the interest this book had for me. I found difficulty with the diaries and notes that the author uses to quote from due to the way the people expressed themselves. If you have a better background in this subject matter than I do, you probably will enjoy the book more than I did. If your background is like mine, you may want to read it, but not purchase it.
Rating:
Summary: As irritating as it is fascinating
Review: This is what the title says: A book about the year 1603. A reader who expects an in-depth explanation of the machinations surrounding the succession of Elizabeth I by James I will be disappointed. Any discussion of this interesting subject remains extremely superficial.
The strength of Lee's work is his attempt to convey to his public what it must have been to live in 1603. This is supported by long quotations from publications of the period, and these are both enlightening and amusing. His rather rambling style of writing is well suited to conveying a period atmosphere.
The big weakness is in the careless way in which the author swims through the surrounding history. At times he throws in references to people and events without bothering to explain who and what to the reader, as if he wants to show off his erudition by being impenetrable. At other times he demonstrates rather crass ignorance for a historian of the period, by messing up the titles of the Cecil family, uncritically repeating gratuitous slander about the Earl of Bothwell, or echoing tyhe schoolboy's book version of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. In a book like this, such errors cannot be excused.
The result is the written equivalent of a custome drama with an unitelligible plot. It is a series of scenes, each conveying a certain atmosphere, but not integrated together in a story. The book fails to convince the reader that is a coherent unit, and in fact it also fails to convince the reader that the author has a good understanding of his own chosen subject.
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