Like the sudden opening of a cavern in his head, reality burnt upon Phaedrus, and in that ice-bright splinter of time he understood at last that this was a fight to the death, that he was fighting, not his comrade Vortimax, whom he had fought scores and hundreds of times before, but death, red-rending death such as the stag’s had been, and the hooks of the mercuries in the dark alleyway.
(from The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff )
I sometimes think that we stand at sunset … It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again … We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.
More about Rosemary Sutcliff‘s award-winning historical novel The Lantern Bearers on this blog
I posted (see below) a few days ago about Rosemary Sutcliff‘s The Eagle of the Ninth being in the top five Kindle e-book sellers (at that point). I failed at first to notice that at Number 1 was Giselle Greene. She posted a comment, which led me to ask her what she thought Rosemary might have made of Kindle. Giselle said:
I think the idea of Kindle wouldn’t have been so foreign to her – she was a Sagittarian, so working in the realms of imagination all the time … and new possibilities for what might be always come first from what we can imagine. I loved her books and I loved her energy, which was very wise and also beautifully innocent at the same time. I think she’d be chuffed that a whole new generation of people are now accessing and enjoying her work and along with it all the values embedded therein.
Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines Quartet (Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain), told the The Book Base that some of his favourite books when he was a child were: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien; The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, Asterix and Tin Tin, the Molesworth books…
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 