Tag: children’s literature

Charlotte loves Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Queen Elizabeth Story | Sutcliff Review of the Week

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Charlotte thinks that  Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s historical novel The Queen Elizabeth Story is  “a lovely book, full of thick description and vivid character and history made real. And its magic is aided and abetted by the wonderful drawings of C. Walter Hodges“, her  “favourite children’s book illustrator.” Charlotte was writing a review on the Charlotte’s Library blog.


What really made this book for me, when I was young, was Adam. He was my first book love ( I was nine), and I am awfully fond of him still. He is lame, but so gallant and kind that Perdita doesn’t notice it…and in a scene I especially love, he invites a sad and lonely Perdita to a private banquet at the manor, where he makes the lords and ladies of a tapestry come alive for her in a glorious magical wonderful-ness.

Film, Books, TV, Radio | The Eagle (of the Ninth) | Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92), author of The Eagle of the Ninth book, now a film due in February 2011 to be called The Eagle, as well as a TV and radio series, wrote some sixty children’s books, historical novels, and stories. This blog reviews and covers all the books by Rosemary Sutcliff: every book for children, adults and young adults, and related TV, radio and films (movies) of the books. Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff | An Unforgettable Writer of Fantasy and more| Sutcliff Review of the Week

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Rosemary Sutcliff, children’s writer and historical novelist, is “unforgettable” to Keith Taylor, himself a writer, in a web article which reader of this blog Anne McFadgen has alerted me to (Thank you!). Her work, he writes,  is “memorable'” because “decades after he has read  her books scenes “from all of them come to my mind’s eye as vividly as if I’d seen them happen”.  Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff’s world of The Eagle of the Ninth is real | An High Tory perspective

Anthony Lawton4 Comments

Rosemary Sutcliff, author of the children’s book and historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth, set in Roman Britain, told me more than once that she believed in re-incarnation and that she had lived in Roman times. Hence, she believed, her feel for that period. So – as I have posted before – I was struck by Barendina Smedley’s words in her blog Fugitive Ink on reading The Eagle of the Ninth for the first time as an adult not a child:

It really does feel as if the world in which she set her characters was, in some sense, as real to her as the characters themselves …  Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff valediction in 1992 | Sutcliff Discovery of the Day

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Rosemary Sutcliff, author of The Eagle of the Ninth now in the news as a ‘sword and sandals’ film (The Eagle of the Ninth!), was reviewed with affectionate insight by Veronica Horwell in The Guardian newspaper shortly after her death in 1992.

Rosemary Sutcliff did not spare the child, the raven and the wolf gorging on the battlefield dead. Read More »