"Scotland's Merlin" by Tim Clarkson

Clarkson, an "independent researcher and historian", claims that the figure of Merlin, the wizard in the Arthurian legends, may in part have been based upon a man called Lailoken.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote Historia Regum Britanniae, the best-selling (there are still over 200 extant manuscripts of this work written c 1136), work which popularised the legends of King Arthur and introduced 'Merlin' to the Arthurian court, also wrote a later work Vita Merlini in which the subject of the biography was involved in a battle, on the side led by Peredur K of Gwynedd, allied with Rodarch, k of Cambrians against Guennolous, K of Scottish forces. He went bonkers following the battle, seeking solitude in the forest. When discovered he was made captive by Rodarch. Here he noticed that the King’s wife had a leaf in her hair and correctly deduced that she had been committing adultery. This got him returned to the forest. Geoffrey also says that Merlin came from Carmarthen.

The Black Book of Carmarthen, compiled c1250, includes poems by a first person narrato called Myrddin) without trappings of Arthuriana but mentioning a battle in which he fought at Arfderydd in northern Britain and subsequent flight in madness to Coed Celyddon; the forest of Celyddon. One of his prophecies concerns a battle fought in 1198 and therefore it can be concluded that the poem was composed after that.

So the hypothesis is that there was a chap called Myrddyn whose name Gdeoffrey changed to Merlin possibly to avoid the Norman-French connotation of 'merde' = 'shit'.

These tales about Myrddin/ Merlin seem to echo tales about a chap called Lailoken who fought in a battle fought in a plain between Lidel and Carwannock and then fled into the wilderness. Lailoken foresees a threefold death in which he is stoned by shepherds, falls into a river and is impaled on a stake which keeps his head below water so he drowns. Another theme is that he sees that the King’s wife has a leaf in her hair and correctly deduces she has been committing adultery.

The battle of Ardferydd which is mentioned three times by 'Merlin' in the Black Book of Carmarthen was a historical battle fought in 573. The battlefield has been identified (though this is still under dispute) as near the modern Carwinley, a hamlet at the confluence of the rivers Esk and Liddel.

Rhydderch Hael aka Roderc was a historical character associated with Alt Clut - the Rock of Clyde = Dun Breatann = Fortress of the Britons = Dumbarton. He had a palace at Pernech = Partick where dwells a madman called Laloecen.

So there seems a sufficient number of similarities to dismiss the possibility of coincidence and accept that thesis that Merlin and Lailoken are the same character.

Coincidentally, there is another 'wild man' of the same period, in the Irish chronicles, called Suibhne (pronounced Sweeney). He too went mad and vanished into the woods, wandering naked following a battle. He literally flew from the battlefield. At one point he went to Britain and met another wild man of the woods called Alladhan (is this Lailoken?). The poetry romance that tells this story was used as the basis for some of the poems allegedly spoken by Mad King Sweeney, a character in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds; ‘Swim-Two-Birds is the English version of the name of a ford in the River Shannon that Sweeney allegedly visited.

Like many of the books of this genre, this is liberally padded and the final conclusion has to be that there is too little evidence to be certain whether the tale told is true or false. However, there was sufficient evidence for me to accept the thesis. And I enjoyed the read: the material i much better organised than many similar books and ther author avoids preposterous claims. 

August 2026; 136 pages and three appendices

Published in 2016 by John Donald

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Angry Brigade" by Gordon Carr

 As the subtitle tells us, this is "a history of Britain's first Urban Guerilla [sic] group." 

I was at school when the Angry Brigade flourished. They had a campaign of bombing property targets (they claim that no-one was ever killed, although some people were seriously injured). As such, they were mild compared to the Baader Meinhof 'Red Army Faction' in Germany or the Brigato Rosso in Italy. It was a time of political violence. Internationally the peasants of North Vietnam were defying the military might of the USA. The CIA were undermining Chile whose democratically elected communist president Salvador Allende would die during a coup against him. Spain and Portugal were still run by fascist dictators who had been installed before the second world war and Greece was taken over by the Colonels in a military coup. Czechoslovakia was to enjoy a brief 'Prague spring' before tanks from the Warsaw Pact took back control. 

In the USA, the Symbionese Liberation Amry kidnapped Patty Hearst and she subsequently took part in a bank robbery they organised, as related in American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin. 

Things were even different in the UK. The demands of the Catholics in Northern Ireland for equal suffrage had been met with British troops on the streets and soon political dissidents were to be interned without trial. And the antics of the Angry Brigade were soon to be quashed by the police acting with questionable legality. Not only were people arrested and questioned without recourse to legal representation, sometimes for longer than the then maximum of 24 hours, but also there were so many questions raised about the searches and the interviews that the jury acquitted half of the defendants, clearly believing that the police had planted evidence and made up confessions. The trial was one of the longest in British criminal history.

These years saw the birth of Gay Liberation, Women's Lib and Feminism, and Black Power. The lasting legacy of all this activism was the real gains made in terms of equal rights and equal opportunities for women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Things are not yet perfect but they are much better than they were.

Not that the Angry Brigade were innocent. Bombers aren't. They also used a sub machine gun to spray bullets at the Spanish Embassy in London. In a bizarre twist, all but one of the bullets missed. For 48 hours the Embassy officials were unaware of the attack, until a cleaner found a bullethole in a pane of glass; the bullet took even longer to be located. During this period the Angry Brigade issued one of their Communiques complaining that the authorities had suppressed news of the attack. It was this that led the police to realise that the communiques really did come from a group that was carrying out attacks!

One of the targets of the Angry Brigade was the 1970 Miss World contest. There had been controversy because the organisers had allowed two contestants from South Africa, one black and one white. TheBrigade bombed a BBC Outside broadcast van. During the competition, Women's Liberation protesters threw flour bombs and heckled the host, Bob Hope. This protest was the subject of a movie called Misbehaviour released in 2020 but so far as I remember the Brigade's bombing went unmentioned.

Of particular interest to me was the fact that John Barker, one of the leading lights of the Brigade, was inspired by the Situationists and in particular The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, the subject of a biography Guy Debord by Andy Merrifield. 

The book is even printed in a way that reminded me of the underground magazines of the period with black and white photos and drawings mingled into the text. To add to the authentic feel, the proof reading is imperfect. It is topped and tailed with pieces from John Barker who was convicted (he claims to have been framed yet admits he was guilty) and Stuart Christie who was found not guilty.

November 2025; 248 pages

Published by PM Press in 2020

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Peter of Savoy: The Little Charlemagne" by John Marshall

Pevensey Castle: Barbara van Cleve, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

A biography of the uncle of Eleanor, the Queen of King Henry III of England, who built a palace on the Strand in London where the Savoy hotel now stands.

Henry III had a long but troubled reign. He inherited the throne from his father King John in the middle of a baronial revolt and French invasion. He was forced to re-concede the Magna Carta and, later in his reign, cede absolute rule to a council of barons headed by his arch-enemy and brother-in-law Simon de Montfort. 

Pierre de Savoie, was the younger son of Thomas I, Count of Savoy. His sister's children included four daughters who, at some time, became queens: of France, of England, of the Romans and of Sicily. Pierre spent some of his time in Savoy where he ruled lands that later became the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and some time in England, trying to secure the succession of his sister's son, Lord Edward, who would eventually become Edward I of England. He was part of a wave of Savoyards who held offices under Henry III (his brother Boniface became Archbishop of Canterbury) eventually leading to a wave of xenophobia that helped Simon de Montfort gain power over Henry. 

This biography chronicles Pierre's life and traces the far-reaching consequences. 

It is clear that, as is common with biographers, the author hero-worships his subject. Nothing he does is viewed in anything but a positive light. Matthew Paris, the chronicler, a key primary source, is repeatedly castigated as biased and xenophobic. Simon de Montfort, whose influence on English politics can scarcely be denied, is depicted as self-serving and villainous, principally for having the temerity to challenge a king.

But my principal criticism of this book is the number of times I found it confusing. One expects difficulties when records are ambiguous or incomplete and when several people are named the same (for example, both Henry III and his brother Richard of Cornwall had a son called Edmund), but a good historian should resolve these problems. Instead, I found Marshall added to them. For example:

• “In 1229, at Lausanne, Pierre began a career that would lead eventually to being one of a council ruling England and Count of Savoy, under the tutelage of the provost, Conon d’Estavayer” who had been educated at Paris. (p 14). The final part of the sentence doesn't make it clear whether the tutelage was in Lausanne or England. Furthermore, the data of 1229 is contradicted on the next page when he is recorded as a canon in Nov 1226.
• “One of his tasks concerned Englishmen of the locale who had not been to church within the prescribed forty days, something that will no doubt have made him popular.” (pp 26 - 27) But we aren't told what he did nor  nor why this action should have made him popular. Perhaps it's irony.
• On page 41 I became very confused as to exactly where Richmond and its castle were, given that three roads are mentioned and two castles; I resorted to Google Maps.
• On page 45 the author lists the Cinque Ports. He says there are five, he names six. A little research suggested that in Pierre's time there were 7.

There were other examples. I ought to be able to read a history without having to resort to Google and wikipedia to clear things up.

In addition, on page 167 Marshall repeats the description of the London cook shop and London’s trade already quoted on pp 72 - 73. This looks suspiciously like padding. 

There's a great deal of interest in this book; it was a fascinating chapter in the political history of England. But the writing detracted from the reading experience.

Selected quotes:

• “In England the genie was out of the bottle; many had rather liked the idea that the king ruled with the consent of his people.” (Ch 8)

September 2025; 188 pages plus extensive appendices and notes

Published in 2023 by Pen and Sword History

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Magus" by Anthony Grafton

“This book traces the rise of learned magic, from its medieval origins to the synthesis that Agrippa created in 1533.” (Introduction)

I think it is written for the specialist rather than the general reader. I found it confusing. Part of the reason for this is the structure of the book: each chapter focuses on the work of one or more scholars, for example, Nicholas of Cusa, Roger Bacon, Pico della Mirandeola, Johannes Trimethius and Agrippa. This meant that the information on, for example, 'natural' magic was broken up as we considered, in turn, what each of these authorities felt about it. I gained the general sense that the issue facing each of them was how to distinguish 'natural' magic (which seemed to mean the marvellous effects that could be produced by science and engineering) which was somehow 'good' from the rest which were snares and delusions set by the devil and his demons. (I suppose this equates with the issue facing alchemy - usually just off-stage in this book - of how to distil what we now call chemistry from the dross of superstition.)

Other reasons I was confused was that sometimes the author seemed to expect me to know more than I did. For example, in chapter 3 he states: “The established Latin magical library came from polyglot sources: Jewish and Muslim but also Greek. Some texts, such as the Latin Picatrix, derived their contents from even more exotic quarters.” What were these 'more exotic quarters'? I wondered. Unfortunately, he doesn't say, nor could wikipedia help.  (107) [It does n’t say where, which is frustrating. Wikipedia suggests that it is primarily Arabic; it doesn’t suggest it goes any further than Arabic, German, Greek, Latin and perhaps some early Christian]

I got even more confused about a polyglot called Samuel bin Nissim Abulfaraj who was baptized as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada and used the pen name Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysis of Pontus. Having given all these names, Grafton then refers to him without warning as ‘Flavius’. Grafton gives no clue as to the identity of Flavius. I had to resort to Google to discover that Flavius was the first name of Mithridates. 

Selected quotes:

• “The masters of the art of hydromancy ... believed that God had not created water since the Book of Genesis described the spirit of God as hovering over the waters.” (Ch 2)
• “‘Meeting monks is generally considered an evil omen, and all the more if it takes place in the morning. For that sort of man lives mostly from the charnel house, as vultures live off corpses.'" (Ch 5, quoting Agrippa)

Heavy-going.

July 2025; 219 pages

First published in 2023 by Harvard University Press, USA

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Books in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" by Joshua Hammer

The story of a massive smuggling operation to save mediaeval manuscripts from jihaidists.

There are two hooks. The first is that title. There seems to be a spate of books recently with the title The #name of a profession of #name of a place, such as The Bookseller of Kabul and The Beekeeper of Aleppo. Normally they leave me unmoved but when I saw this title, I knew I had to read the book. The second hook is the prologue which recounts the most dramatic incident recounted in the book, the sort of prologue that seems to be obligatory for this sort of book.

Duly hooked, I then moved into a five chapter section that recounts how Abdel Kader Haidara, our hero, became a librarian after inheriting his fathers collection of manuscripts. Timbuktu, where Haidara lived, had been one of the jewels of Islamic scholarship in the middle-ages and was home to about 400,000 manuscripts, some single pages, some books, which - because of trouble over the last few hundred years involving colonial rule and regular attempts by the local Tuaregs to gain independence - were mostly scattered in family collections and hidden in cellars and store rooms and caches in the desert. Haidara became recruited by the Ahmed Baba Institute to search out manuscripts and persuade their owners to lend, donate or sell them to a central library where they could be properly preserved (the dry desert conditions meant the manuscripts were unlikely to rot but termites were a huge problem) and archived. He also set up his own family library.

The second section of the book (another four chapters) considers the provenance of the fundamentalist jihadi Islamists who were to capture Timbuktu in April 2012. Here we are introduced to several of the main jihadi leaders.

Then we come to the meat of the book. Haidara realised that Islamists are likely to destroy many of the manuscripts because, besides Islamic teachings, many of them refer to secular matters, including history, medicine, astrology, magic and love poetry. So he started to smuggle them out of the now 45 libraries and back into hiding places with trusted residents. Then he realised that even this is insufficiently secure and organised a covert operation to move them by river to the Malian held city in the south.

Finally we learn of the defeat of the Islamists and the return of music and tourism. 

It's presented as a stirring adventure story, goodies versus baddies, with no attempt to consider alternative viewpoints. As such, it exceeds expectations. It is exciting. There is ever-present danger. There are moments when you wonder why any back-packing tourist would dream of exploring the frequently-god-forsaken corner of the earth, braving not just discomfort and disease but the threat of kidnap and murder. For those of us who like sitting comfortably at home, it's armchair excitement.

It also made me ask whether any work of art or cultural artefact is worth the price of a human life. But I suppose these things endure, testifying to the human spirit long after we temporary humans have turned to windblown dust.

Selected quotes: 

• “A Sudanese proverb from the time declared that ‘Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo’” (Ch 2)
• “Timbuktu grew from a collection of tents and mud-and-wattle houses along the riverbank into a crossroads of the world and a collision point of two cultures - bringing together desert and river traffic in continuous and mutually enriching exchanges.” (Ch 2)
• “In 1995, the town had no newspapers, one radio station, and two phone lines.” (Ch 5)
• “We were sitting on carpets ... The salon was decorated with Tuareg swords and dusty family photographs, and a gas-operated ‘cooling machine’ stirred up the stultifying air, rattling as we talked.” (Ch 11)
• “The knife-edge summit of the giant dune, its surface intricately scalloped by the constant wind.” (Ch 11)
• “The forty-five libraries served as repositories for a total of 377,000 manuscripts.” (Ch 12)
• “The worship of saints and the construction of shrines had spread through much of the Islamic world following the death of the Prophet Muhammad ... It was not until the eighteenth century, when Muhammad Abd al Wahhab ... began his campaign of religious purification, that such rights and practices began to be seen as heretical.” (Ch 13)
• “The streets outside the noisy and squalid, a jumble of shabby concrete-block buildings and exhaust-spewing motorbikes.” (Ch 14)
• “Haidara kept a cell phone on each ear ... receiving reports from his couriers every few minutes: the sweat acted as an adhesive, gluing the device's to his ears.” (Ch 16)

May 2025; 242 pages

First published by Simon & Schuster in New York, USA in 2016

My Simon & Schuster paperback edition was issued in 2016

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Wager" by David Grann

 

A gripping true story of shipwreck and its aftermath set during the 1740s.

In 1740 a squadron of eight Royal Navy ships led by Commodore George Anson set off to attack Spanish shipping during the War of Jenkin's Ear. The plan was to cross the Atlantic, go round Cape Horn into the Pacific, and capture the Spanish treasure ship somewhere near the Philippines. Almost immediately, disease (including scurvy) began to deplete the crew. The seas at Cape Horn were atrocious: two ships turned back. HMS Wager, captained by David Cheap, rounded the Horn but turned north to early and was wrecked off the coast of Chile. The survivors were stuck on a island and began to starve. They began to split into factions. One group, under the command of the gunner, built a boat and sailed through the Straits of Magellan to the coast of Brazil from where they eventually made it back to England. The captain and some officers were rescued by native Americans and some of them also returned, even later, to England. Once back home, accusations of mutiny and counter-accusations of murder were made and best-selling books published to justify points of view.

The rest of Anson's expedition were eventually reduced to a single ship with a skeleton crew; nevertheless, they successfully captured the Spanish treasure galleon and completed the circumnavigation of the globe to return home.

This is not so much a tale of derring do and heroic survival against all odds as a chronicle of what can happen when men are in extremis: there is mutiny and murder, theft of supplies, tyranny and rebellion. It's like a real-life version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Above all there is death, repeated death, usually from sickness. The ship had a complement of 120 men when it left England; ten returned (of Anson's command, 188 out of 1854 survived). As with Grann's previous history also set in South America, The Lost City of Z, I wondered why anyone who had any choice would embark on a voyage when death from drowning, exposure, disease, starvation and enemy action were all more likely than survival. 

One of the naval officers was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron who refers to his grand-dad's exploits in his poetry. In his subsequent career (yes, he went back to sea!) he achieved notoriety as a  commander who always seemed to attract dreadful storms and received the nickname 'Foul Weather Jack'. 

It's a ripping yarn. The history is thoroughly researched and well-explained; the well-written story keeps you reading to the end. I read it in two days.

There was one error I noted. When discussing naval slang, the author repeats the oft-repeated assertion that the phrase 'piping hot' derives from the fact that a pipe was sounded to call the crew to meals. This seems unlikely given that Chaucer uses the phrase in Canterbury Tales, published in the 14th Century, two centuries before Henry VIII founded the Royal Navy. 

Selected quotes:

• "A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he'd been 'round it, but never in it'." (Ch 1)
• "When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be 'under the weather'" (Ch 3)
• "To keep warm they [the Native American Kawesqar who wore almost no clothing despite the chilly climate] oiled their skin with insulating seal blubber." (Ch 11)

Also by David Grann:

• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

Links to my reviews of other travel and exploration books may be found by clicking here.

March 2025; 257 pages

• First published in 2023 in the US by Doubleday
• My Simon and Schuster paperback edition was issued in the UK in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Crypt" by Alice Roberts

“Osteoarchaeology, paleopathology and now archaeogenomics are transforming our understanding of the past.” (Epilogue) In this fascinating and utterly readable book, Professor Alice Roberts shows how the study of ancient skeletons can mesh with the sequencing of DNA and, where available, historic documents to give us new insights into our human past.

This book is a sequel to Ancestors, which focused on BC, and Buried which considered the first millennium AD. This book studies burials from 1002 AD until 1545. But as well as learning about archaeology and history and bony anatomy, I also learned about how archaeologists can work out where a skeleton grew up from the balance of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth, a great deal about leprosy - who knew you can catch it from an armadillo? - 

The first chapter analyses skeletons found in Oxford that appear to have been buried after being violently killed. Are they the bodies of people killed on Saint Brice's day (13th Nov) in 1002 after Ethelred the Unready called for a massacre of Danes? The second investigates the graveyard of a mediaeval leper hospital and asks whether leper hospitals originated in pre-Conquest England. Chapter 3 tells the story of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket and asks whether a skeleton discovered in 1888 could belong to him. Chapter 4 is surprised by a high incidence of Paget's Disease in a single churchyard. Chapter 5 traces, through osteoarchaeology, the prehistoric lineage of the bacterium responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and Bubonic Plague. Chapter 6 considers bone deformities in the skeletons of those drowned when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose sank and Chapter 7 asks whether syphilis found in the skeleton of a mediaeval anchoress can tell us whether the disease came to Europe from the New World in the wake of Columbus.

Seven fascinating stories. History, prehistory, science and even some maths, all told in an engaging style (with some very poor puns, see selected quotes). What's not to like?

Selected quotes:

• “It shows the potential for aDNA from fishbones - which everyone had previously thought would be dead in the water.” (Ch 1)
• “Archaeology explores the past from the ground up, not the top down.” (Ch 2)
• “Henry arranged to have his son, Henry Junior, crowned in preparation, so that he could immediately step into his father's clogs when he popped them.” (Ch 3)
• “Some diseases kill so quickly, there are no traces lift on bones.” (Ch 5)

July 2024; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The First Crusade" by Peter Frankopan

When, in November 1095, Pope Urban II preached at Clermont, France, in about the need for a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims, it was partly to boost his own standing (he was one of two alternative popes, the other having control of Rome) and partly in response to a call for help from Byzantine emperor  Alexios I Komnenos. This book rewrites the myths to show how important Alexios was to the ultimately successful campaign to retake Jerusalem. Even though he was never physically present, preferring to lead from Constantinople, and was therefore accused of cowardice (unfairly, as a soldier before he became emperor and subsequently as emperor he often led his armies in the field) and sidelined by a history mostly written by the westerners, nevertheless his contribution to the logistics, ensuring that the armies were almost always well-provisioned, was crucial. 

This book is therefore an important contribution to the history of those times, as well as being immensely readable. Of all the characters, my favourite is the immensely brave and hugely talented soldier Bohemond who decided to keep Antioch for himself thus provoking a crisis in the leadership of the allies. When Bohemond returned home to the west he needed to pass through waters controlled by Byzantium. “Bohemond was so convinced that the emperor would take revenge for his treachery during the Crusade that he travelled home in secret. He even spread reports that he had died and had a coffin designed which purported to be carrying his corpse. As his ship passed through imperial waters, he lay in his sarcophagus alongside a dead chicken whose rotting carcase lent the coffin a powerful and unmistakable smell of death.” (Ch 10)

Readable and interesting. June 2024; 206 pages

Peter Frankopan also write The New Silk Roads

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God