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.
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In this insightful Radio NZ discussion Kate de Goldi frequently references John Rowe Townsend’s critical essay on Rosemary Sutcliff in his 1971 book “A Sense of Story”. The phrase “a body of work rather than a shelf of novels” is taken from this essay’s wonderfully striking and poetic introduction which de Goldi quotes to great effect:
“Day to day, minute to minute, second to second the surface of our lives is in a perpetual ripple of change. Below the immediate surface are slower, deeper currents, and below these again are profound mysterious movements beyond the scale of the individual life-span. And far down on the sea-bed are the oldest, most lasting things, whose changes our imagination can hardly grasp at all. The strength of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main work—and it is a body of work rather than a shelf of novels—is its sense of movement on all these scales. Bright the surface may be, and vigorous the action of the moment, but it is never detached from the forces underneath that give it meaning. She puts more into the reader’s consciousness than he is immediately aware of.”
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 
In this insightful Radio NZ discussion Kate de Goldi frequently references John Rowe Townsend’s critical essay on Rosemary Sutcliff in his 1971 book “A Sense of Story”. The phrase “a body of work rather than a shelf of novels” is taken from this essay’s wonderfully striking and poetic introduction which de Goldi quotes to great effect:
“Day to day, minute to minute, second to second the surface of our lives is in a perpetual ripple of change. Below the immediate surface are slower, deeper currents, and below these again are profound mysterious movements beyond the scale of the individual life-span. And far down on the sea-bed are the oldest, most lasting things, whose changes our imagination can hardly grasp at all. The strength of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main work—and it is a body of work rather than a shelf of novels—is its sense of movement on all these scales. Bright the surface may be, and vigorous the action of the moment, but it is never detached from the forces underneath that give it meaning. She puts more into the reader’s consciousness than he is immediately aware of.”
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