Picture a few famous queens from history, and what do you see? Cleopatra reclining on her barge, Boudica brandishing her spear, Anne Boleyn driving Henry VIII mad with desire, Mary Tudor burning Protestants, Elizabeth I declaring she has ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, obese Queen Anne sitting fatly around during her long run of failed pregnancies.

Reading Kate Williams’s hard-hitting book about royal women feels like going on an unconscious bias course designed to end our simplistic attitudes to queens.

History, she reminds us, was written mostly by men, who have had a tendency to diminish the achievements of women. Far easier to categorise queens as vain and seductive than discover the sensible, business-minded, economically switched-on women many were.

Queen Anne, far from being a couch potato, was a patron of the arts and a brilliant diplomat. She’s a typical queen whose reign ‘should be better remembered’.

The time has come, Williams urges, to lift Cleopatra out of the reclining position. (Blame Shakespeare for that.) And forget what you’ve read about her. A typical guidebook Williams bought in Luxor says, ‘Cleopatra was the centre-spread fold-out who bedded the two most powerful Romans of her day’. This ‘reduces her to a seductive nude model, a sex queen … the woman who ruined Egypt due to her passion for men’.

Cleopatra should in fact be remembered as ‘the queen of incredible courage, who did more to stave off occupation than any other ruler, and saved her country from famine and inflation’. Her wealth, after her union with Mark Antony, ‘literally saved indebted, overstretched Rome’.

On we storm, through queens and royal women. Boudica was not a ‘crazed monster’, but a fighter bent on avenging the rape of her daughter. Of the Chinese queen Wu Zetian, who ruled China in the 600s and fuelled a highly successful economy, historians have written, ‘she rose from the harem’. Williams advises us to think of the ‘harem’ as a ‘women’s court – not half-dressed women around a pool’.

It’s quite an achievement for a book to encompass Cleopatra at one end and Princess Grace of Monaco at the other. All expected to be beautiful, but condemned as selfish and airheaded.

At Princess Grace’s wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, the bishop pointedly reminded her that beauty was ‘brief and not important’.

Things did get worse for many queens. Queen Isabella of Spain’s heir was to be Joanna, but when Isabella died in 1504, Joanna was treated appallingly by her father and by her son, who imprisoned her for 13 years, saying she was too mad to rule.

Joanna was a new one on me, as were other queens in this wide-ranging book. Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar didn’t cede any power during her reign from 1828. She comes across as pretty ruthless – her favourite punishment was making people eat a poisoned fruit, and to observe its slow, agonising effects. ‘Some pleaded just to be executed.’

Catherine of Aragon was not ‘retiring, saintly or passive’, but a brilliant debater who dared to stand up to her husband. Anne Boleyn ‘wasn’t the type who baked Tudor cupcakes’; but her clear rebuttal of the crimes she was wrongly accused of was incredibly brave.

And ‘Bloody’ Mary? She did execute 300 Protestants, but her father, Henry VIII, executed 70,000 people.

I’ll now be careful when assigning any adjective to a queen.