Vaster than Empires and More Slow
It was, of course, Andrew Marvell, not me, who wrote 'vaster than empires and more slow', but the line kept coming into my mind as I was thinking about the two books in this month's post. Some time or other, probably at school, I was told that the Romans came to Britain, stayed a few hundred years, and then left when the Empire started to crumble and they had to get back to defend Rome against marauding barbarians. After that, life in Britain more or less reverted to the uncivilised state that had existed before the Romans arrived, and everything went dark until the Normans came. Rosemary Sutcliff likes to shine a light on those supposed 'dark ages', though in her use of the image of 'lantern bearers' carrying the light of Roman (and Christian) civilisation forward after the Romans left, she is, in a way, perpetuating the idea of an age of darkness. But that doesn't prevent this being a brilliant book. Sutcliff describes how, while making toast for bre...