For award-winning, internationally-acclaimed author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). By Anthony Lawton: godson, cousin & literary executor. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical fiction, children's literature and books, films, TV & radio, including The Eagle of the Ninth, Sword at Sunset, Song for a Dark Queen, The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, Dawn Wind, Blue Remembered Hills.
Here is the 1965 Dutch version of Rosemary Sutcliff’s acclaimed children’s novel ‘The Eagle of the Ninth‘.
Inside are the same beautiful illustrations by C. Walter Hodges, evident in all the early editions of the novel. This particular illustration depicts Marcus and his Legion, ‘The Fourth Gaulish Auxiliaries of the Second Legion’ breaking formation in their battle with a British tribe.
Well, that’s THE BOOK. The book that got me hooked on Rosemary Sutcliff, but also the book that got me hooked on Roman history. I must have been about 9 years old or something, but it shaped my life. I’m not kidding! How could a mere novel do that? Well, my fascination with the Roman world was fed by a holiday in Germany (http://www.fectio.org.uk/sites/limes1973.htm), right along the Roman Limes and its reconstructed wooden watchtowers. The die was cast. I began reading more books by Rosemary Sutcliff, and after school I studied history, where I met my current wife. Sutcliff’s Arthurian novels had by then set me in the direction of the post-Roman period, which brought me to research Vortigern (http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/) and later the Later Roman army (http://www.fectio.org.uk/). Need I say more? :)
A detail: I later managed to buy the very book that began all this when the library cast it aside.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 
The line illustrations are classics: all black & white, no half-tones; simply beautiful.
I regret that the only copy I own is the 1986 Puffin reprint that I bought to read to my son. My own original copy of 1977 has long gone.
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Well, that’s THE BOOK. The book that got me hooked on Rosemary Sutcliff, but also the book that got me hooked on Roman history. I must have been about 9 years old or something, but it shaped my life. I’m not kidding! How could a mere novel do that? Well, my fascination with the Roman world was fed by a holiday in Germany (http://www.fectio.org.uk/sites/limes1973.htm), right along the Roman Limes and its reconstructed wooden watchtowers. The die was cast. I began reading more books by Rosemary Sutcliff, and after school I studied history, where I met my current wife. Sutcliff’s Arthurian novels had by then set me in the direction of the post-Roman period, which brought me to research Vortigern (http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/) and later the Later Roman army (http://www.fectio.org.uk/). Need I say more? :)
A detail: I later managed to buy the very book that began all this when the library cast it aside.
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