The historical side of ["For My Great Folly," an] immensely entertaining novel set in England and the Mediterranean must be dealt with first despite the author's disclaimer of a factual foundation for much of it. It was a critical time: the opening years of the reign of the Scottish King of England whose fatuous attempts to wrest freedom from his subjects led, afterward, to civil war and the establishment of a Commonwealth. If you were entirely ignorant of the history involved you could take Thomas B(ertram) Costain 1885–1965 The Granger Collection, New Yorkthe story as sheer fiction and enjoy it throughout on that different plane. It is not unleavened fiction. A very important slice of it, for which Mr. Costain gives himself no credit, is the vivid and substantially accurate picture of King James I's corrupt court painted here with neither bias nor exaggeration. But there are...