Tag: Romans

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of The Ninth is an inspiration!

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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.

Roman Ninth Legion’s guilty secret | Rosemary Sutcliff Google Watch

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Roman legionnaires, like those in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman novel The Eagle of the Ninth, according to The Observer newspaper:

… have been the subject of innumerable romantic books and films, including the forthcoming epic, The Eagle (of the Ninth), directed by Kevin Macdonald. But new evidence … has revealed that life for a soldier in the Roman Ninth Legion had a more mundane side. A newly excavated site near Healam Bridge fort, North Yorkshire, a military outpost used by the Ninth, has shown soldiers there had their own industrial estate nearby to provide them with clothes, pottery and other equipment. And, although this is not actually new information, they wore socks with their sandals …

Source: Revealed: the Roman Ninth Legion’s guilty secret

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 cross-over book The SiIver Branch loved by Scottish Amazon customer | Rosemary Sutcliff Review of the Week

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novel The Silver Branch was much admired and enjoyed by Amazon Scottish customer Robert Livingston, who gave it five stars a few years back.

When I was just old enough to start taking an interest in ‘real’ books, a wise librarian suggested to my mother that I might like The Silver Branch. I have loved it ever since and have read and reread it many times. Read More »