SOURCE: Taylor, D. J. “A Veteran with a Secret.” Spectator 287, no. 9025 (28 July 2001): 32.

In the following review, Taylor commends Thorpe's portrayal of his protagonist in Nineteen Twenty-One, but notes that the novel occasionally loses focus.

Without wanting to turn hugely reductive, there are perhaps two main procedural difficulties involved in writing the kind of historical novel which it is possible to respect. The first is the problem of sensibility: did the inhabitants of Ancient Rome, Saxon Dorset or Dreyfus-era France really think and speak like this? The second—and quite as obtrusive if it goes wrong—is the problem of artefacts, in other words furnishing your recreated world with items that are appropriate to the milieu without conveying a sense of removal men shifting things into place. To put it another way, there were other records on the juke box in 1963 apart from ‘She Loves You’ and other topics...