John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy
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This book is the winner, 2008 Otto Grundler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute Notorious for his...
Large Databases in Economic History: Research Methods and Case Studies
Mark Casson and Nigar Hashimzade
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'Big data' is now readily available to economic historians, thanks to the digitisation of primary...
Homa Variations: The Study of Ritual Change Across the Longue Duree
Richard K. Payne and Michael Witzel
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The practice of making votive offerings into fire dates from the earliest periods of human history,...
Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam
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In this controversial study, Aaron W. Hughes breaks with received opinion, which imagines two...
After Alexander: Central Asia Before Islam
Georgina Hermann and Joe Cribb
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This is a new study of the history, archaeology and numismatics of Central Asia, an area of great...
The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
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In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his...
Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600
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This book provides the historical background for a central issue in the history of science: the...
Therein Lies the Pearl
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Normandy, 1064 Celia Campion, a girl of humble background, finds herself caught in a web of...
Historical Fiction Anglo Saxon History Early Medieval St Margaret
Deborah (162 KP) rated Stormbird (Wars of the Roses, #1) in Books
Dec 21, 2018
Overall, it wasn't badly written, but I was less than halfway through and couldn't wait for it to be over (I'm far to stubborn to give up part way through!). We lurch from one battle, to a nice bit of torture and a bit of violence and some more blood and another battle..... you get my drift! And no, I don't think I have an unrealistic view of the past and it was bloody and those in power would have been what we might call self serving but they would probably though of as pragmatic, but this seemed to concentrate on the violence to the exclusion of just about everything else.
I'm not sure if Iggulden anticipated the reader feeling sympathy with any of the characters, but I found this difficult as there wasn't a great deal of character development, as it tended to get in the way of the blood letting. Everyone seemed to be self serving and the expression 'smug' was used on a number of occasions - not exactly endearing!
I don't think I'll bother with the rest of the series and just go back to my non-fiction books on the period.
Conscience: A Very Short Introduction
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Where does our conscience come from? How reliable is it? In the West conscience has been relied upon...