Trawling the internet, researching libraries and databases, and occasionally from material sent to me, I discover things I did not know much about, or indeed at all! There can be more than one Discovery of the Day.
Here is photo kindly sent to me by Stephen Walby, who lives in the house where Rosemary Sutcliff wrote most of her books. This is how I remember her garden, looking out from her study or next to it. And it may be what David Sutcliff recalls in a very recent post on this blog, at the You Write! section.
The last recorded, datable activity of this (9th) legion in Britain was in 108/109, when it built a stone fortress at York. What happened next, is unclear. Several scholars have argued that it was defeated and annihilated by the Picts, maybe in 117/118, and that this caused the emperor Hadrian to build the famous wall in northern England. (This is the assumption of the famous novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth, 1954.) Read More »
“You’ll gladly enslave yourself to Kevin Macdonald’s rollicking sword-and-sandal epic” which is “a beautifully executed piece of pulp fiction”, says Time Out New York of The Eagle. It is, says The New York Magazine, an “unfashionably exciting adaptation“, and a “rip-snortin adventure tale” says influential Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times, Read More »
A great visit to Silchester yesterday, organised for journalists covering The Eagle film … I saw for the first time the Silchester Eagle, in the museum in nearby Reading. It was smaller than I imagined. It was the artefact that, with the mystery of the disappearance of the ninth legion from military records, stimulated Rosemary Sutcliff to imagine her bestselling The Eagle of the Ninth historical novel. Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 