“... The history​ of paganism in Britain spans more than thirty thousand years, almost the whole time that humans have inhabited these islands, bar a few state-enforced Christian centuries in the medieval and early modern periods. It also takes in many different kinds of belief, for some of which we have written records – Roman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse – while others are known only from archaeology and from the landscape, which is still marked by many thousands of monuments, some large and obvious, most overgrown or unnoticed ...”

“... At the start​ of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer has the Wife declare that her tale is set long ago, in the days of King Arthur. Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country with prayers and blessings ...”

“... Brian Aldiss gives his definition of Science Fiction on page one of Chapter One of a five-hundred-page volume. This is admirably bold of him – more timorous scholars tuck their definitions away inconspicuously, or else develop complex excuses for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along ...”

“... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...”

“... The two words​ of Max Adams’s title are in a way antithetical. Alfred is the only English king to be referred to regularly as ‘the Great’, and once upon a time the reason was well known to everyone.* It was because, early in the year 878, hiding out incognito in a peasant’s hut in the Somerset Levels, he ‘burned the cakes’. Some 12 years before, Anglo-Saxon England had been invaded by a Viking army, and in quick succession the Vikings conquered three of the four major English kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia or ‘the March’, the last of which covered most of the English Midlands from the Humber to the Thames ...”

“... A captious person might mutter that The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe is a little ‘hobbitical’: it reminds one of Professor Tolkien’s hobbits, who ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’. This would be unfair, in that it is a splendid volume, presenting contemporary scholarship to the general reader with care, grace, much thought and many illustrations; filled with things that most general readers won’t know at all, and that many specialist readers won’t have thought of ...”

“... The ‘Viking’ is one of the strongest images in contemporary popular culture. As Régis Boyer remarks in his essay in Northern Antiquity on the French reception of Old Norse literature, Vikings look out, under their now traditional horned helmets, from every herring tin in the supermarket, while a great part of the population of Normandy marks itself off from the Parisian riff-raff by putting little longship stickers on their cars ...”

“... twice before buying duplicates of material they already possess. The Road to Middle-Earth, by T.A. Shippey, sets out to explore Tolkien’s imaginative writing in relation to the texts he studied and to the scholarship he published. Shippey thereby ‘reaches’, the dust-jacket assures us, ‘the core of Tolkien’s ...”

“... the sterility of the exercise is surely part of the appeal.1The big man of Tolkien criticism is Tom Shippey, who has now written two books on the topic. Like Tolkien, he is English and a philologist by background – ‘ideally suited to write about his predecessor’, as the jacket-flap of his latest book says. He held Tolkien’s Chair at Leeds for a ...”

“... review, if asked. In the Leeds University School of English ‘Research Review: 1984’ Professor Tom Shippey talks about the double life of the reviewing academic: Writing reviews is a job with no official rewards. It is true you get paid for them (sometimes); but they do not count as ‘publications’ on a CV, bring no academic credit, and are often ...”

“... including a biologist, a geologist, an anthropologist, an astronomer, and preferably Professor Tom Shippey of Leeds University to advise on the philology. A novel written under such conditions needs as much planning as a mountaineering expedition; and Brian Aldiss has performed the Science Fictional equivalent of scaling the Matterhorn. The production ...”