Rosemary Sutcliff fan Robert Vermaat wrote this great comment in response to the Dutch version of The Eagle of the Ninth book cover I posted yesterday.

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 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 and, later, the Later Roman Army. Need I say more?

A detail: I later managed to buy the very book that began all this when the library cast it aside.

• More on this site about people influenced and inspired by Rosemary Sutcliff