Search Results

“... Robert Bartlett examines with verve, scholarship and gusto the extraordinary story of a Welshman hanged by the neck outside Swansea in 1290 (and rehanged to make double sure he was done for), and restored to life by the intervention of a saint. The Welshman was William Cragh (cragh in Welsh means ‘the scabby’), a follower, it appears, of the Welsh patriot Rhys ap Maredudd ...”

“... These two paperbacks, of Geoffroi de Charny’s A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry and Edward, Duke of York’s The Master of Game, make accessible two texts that are of exceptional interest for the light they shed on the ethos, style and tastes of the secular aristocracy of the later Middle Ages. Charny’s book offers an exploration and explanation of the values and proper manner of life for Christian knights and men at arms by someone who was a knight himself ...”

“... The greatest mercenary of an age when soldiers of fortune flourished,’ says the cover flap of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular ...”

“... Returning unbidden from exile in July 1399 to claim his confiscated inheritance as Duke of Lancaster while Richard II was in Ireland, Henry Bolingbroke was greeted tumultuously as the prospective saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his cousin’s power ...”

“... In the fifth circle of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet and his guide Beatrice encounter the spirit of his Florentine Crusading ancestor Cacciaguida. Together they discourse on the contrasts between Florence as it is now and as Cacciaguida knew it, in the mid-12th century. The city then was only a fifth of its present compass, Cacciaguida tells them. Its population has since been swelled by a host of immigrants; the grandfather of one who now prospers changing coin (cambio) and doing commerce (merca), was, he says, a countryman begging his way about Semifonte ...”

“... Like Edward Gibbon, that earlier master of narrative history, Jonathan Sumption went to Magdalen College, Oxford and stayed the course there longer and more successfully than his great predecessor. There are other points of comparison. Both left academia early for more public walks in life; Gibbon successively as squire, officer in the militia and Member of Parliament, Sumption for the Bar, where he became a leading QC ...”

“... theatrically over the warriors was a valuable part of a knight’s intellectual equipment. As Maurice Keen points out, heraldry was ‘one of the prime keys to a secular chivalrous erudition that was at once literal and visual, practical and ideological’. Dr Keen’s book is a brilliantly successful attempt to ...”

“... who the leaders were, let alone what they were after, and a difficult silence followed until Maurice Keen asked me about the battle of Waterloo. What should have been a straightforward discussion ended in surly disagreement about whether or not Wellington had been unduly cautious about his right flank, and I left the room convinced that I would be ...”

“... reads as a living-in-the-past, an escape from the brutalities of 15th-century war. In 1984 Maurice Keen, incidentally a strong admirer of Huizinga, showed with conviction in his Chivalry that the mythology of knighthood had a more positive function: that of softening the brutalities. Again, take the witch craze. Obedient to contemporary ...”

“... along, or whether it is a deliberate strategy, I think it’s a kind of masterstroke. By contrast, Maurice Powicke in The 13th Century devotes little more than a hundred of his eight hundred pages to those first four decades.Yet the whole period covering Henry’s minority and his emergence into personal rule is fascinating in its own right and deserves the ...”

“... good-humoured) debate in Past and Present, a splendid survey of The Outlaws of Medieval England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins ...”

“... or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), ...”

“... I remember him as a small bullying man with highly polished boots; he thought the world of Maurice Keen (quite rightly) but took me for a fool and more or less said so. He’d apparently served with distinction in the First War and been decorated for gallantry by the French, the gallantry including driving his men over the top at the point of a ...”

“... money and books and a place in Seattle society were no problem. Everything began with reading, and Maurice Hewlett was one of the favourites: Even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, published in 1900 ... the medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an ...”

“... such as Daudet, Dumas fils, Halévy and Goncourt and the promising novelists Anatole France and Maurice Barrès,who became one of her closest and most faithful friends. She held open house for her entourage during the summer in a villa on the Normandy coast. In short, she enjoyed remarkable literary success. She also threw herself into the thrilling world ...”