I love history and languages from the first time my school classes opened my eyes to them and it has stayed with me ever since. Learning Latin helped me to understand how these people talked and how they thought and expressed themselves. It didn’t matter what, whether the daily lives of Romans and how they built their empire. It has coloured my thinking, and helped me in writing all my books that take place during the past, whether in Roman life or medieval warfare.
When Beth Westood suddenly found herself in London in a new century with a new name, she had no idea she would fall desperately in love with a highwayman, who nursed her through the Black Plague, and then suddenly disappeared.
If only she had a way to contact him but he turned up when she least expected it. When she received word that he was badly burned in a different area of London, she braved desperate mobs, cutthroats, and the cinders of London's still-burning streets to get to him, sick inside whether she would reach him in time.
If you think our wars are long and drawn out, the 25-year war between Athens and Sparta at the time of Athenian power in ancient Greece. The story is told by Alexis, born at a time of plague and the outset of the war. Alexias is born to a rich family and takes part in all the big events that shaped the outcome of the war. The book traces his adventures from his school days and how he witnessed the great naval battle in the Great Harbour, how he was captured and buried his father on his return. There are also references to Alicabides, a prominent figure in Athens at the time.
The Last of the Wine is more than about battles. It also offers great insights into how lived beyond the constant battles that pepper the book and coming to know some of the key Athenian statesmen who come alive in the book. If you like reading about ancient times, as I do, you'll find The Last of the Wine fascinating.
Athens and Sparta, the mighty city states of ancient Greece, locked together in a quarter century of conflict: the Peloponnesian War. Alexias the Athenian was born, passed through childhood and grew to manhood in those troubled years, that desperate and dangerous epoch when the golden age of Pericles was declining into uncertainty and fear for the future. Of good family, he and his friends are brought up and educated in the things of the intellect and in athletic and martial pursuits. They learn to hunt and to love, to wrestle and to question. And all the time his star of…
The year is 1600 and finds the hero, Blackthorn shipwrecked just off the shores of Japan. He has a front-row seat in the turbulent metamorphosis of Japan’s society from a society of medieval fiefdoms to a more modern country and the quest of a warlord to unite these fiefdoms and become the Shogun or supreme military commander. The story is told over two books and became a smash TV series.
Clavell works in Japanese phrases in a way it’s understandable by English readers but for me, as an old Latin student, he has Blackthorn and Mariko, who is his guide to various places, speak in Latin. And later in the book, Maiko also speaks Portuguese, which she had learned from a Jesuit, who was also in Japan at this time.
I loved everything about the book—from start to finish. It's Japan as it's emerging from the Middle Ages and how the warrior class lived—but most of all, its fast-moving plot and insights into its culture that still exist today and make the characters come alive.
'Clavell never puts a foot wrong . . . Get it, read it, you'll enjoy it mightily' Daily Mirror
This is James Clavell's tour-de-force; an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Both entertaining and incisive, SHOGUN is a stunningly dramatic re-creation of a very different world.
Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, the novel charts Blackthorne's rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the hights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. All as civil war looms over the fragile country.
And speak Caesar Augustus does with a number of prominent figures, including Cleopatra, Mark Anthony, Tiberius, Cicero, and even Virgil. His comments and asides let us know what he really thinks of them. He lets you know that the war with Pompey is a distraction and a bore. His comments are blunt and reveal a strong, wily individual completely in control of the Latin empire, and written in a way that, at times, you forget you’re not reading a history book but fiction.
It was comments like this regarding his meeting with Cleopatra that make the book rewarding:
“I felt her power, her quite remarkable seductiveness. It was like listening to the deepest, most desirable temptation; it held promises of bliss and power. I understood how Anthony had found himself caught like a beast in a net. I looked away…”
Like Ken Follett’s other books on medieval England, A Column of Fire is easy to read. The plot runs smoothly and quickly in a way that keeps you glued to the book until you finish it. This time he zeros in on the religious turmoil that gripped Tudor England on the death of Queen Mary. Elizabeth’s ascension was challenged by Catholics who wanted to see Mary, Queen of Scots as the rightful heir to the throne, as well as by the king of Spain, who had another score to settle when he sent a massive armada to conquer England.
A Column of Fire is a novel but it doesn’t stop Follett, a former journalist with a passion for accuracy, from peeking into the lives of even minor characters into corners I was not aware of. I like Follett’s writing style – easy to read, fast-paced with one new character after another.
"Absorbing . . . impossible to resist." -The Washington Post
As Europe erupts, can one young spy protect his queen? #1 New York Times bestselling author Ken Follett takes us deep into the treacherous world of powerful monarchs, intrigue, murder, and treason with his magnificent new epic, A Column of Fire.
In 1558, the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look down on a city torn apart by religious conflict. As power in England shifts precariously between Catholics and Protestants, royalty and commoners clash, testing friendship, loyalty, and love.
When most of us think about the 14th Century, we see it as a time of chivalry, knights, and crusades. It was anything but for most people who feared the ending of the world. It was everything that was with us still, whether corruption in high places or taxes. But it also had bankers, saints, mystics, and all the good and bad things that are with us today.
I read Barbara Tuchman’s book over a period of two months. It was a wonderful read. Each chapter offers a glimpse of the events and happenings that shaped the world as we came to know it. If you’re interested in medieval Europe, the book is a wonderful gift. It is also a book of surprises. I was intrigued to learn that “people knew the world was a globe before Columbus, where “a man could go around the world as a fly makes the tour of an apple.”
The fourteenth century was a time of fabled crusades and chivalry, glittering cathedrals and grand castles. It was also a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague.
Here, Barbara Tuchman masterfully reveals the two contradictory images of the age, examining the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike.
Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries and guilty passions, Tuchman recreates the lives of proud cardinals,…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
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