Rosemary Sutcliff is an intuitive historian. This is not to say that she is not most careful and exact in research, but that her ability to think herself back into the past transcends scholarship. Her acknowledged master is Kipling who had the same gift for feeling history through his nerves and seeking it through the soil. Rosemary Sutcliff began her career with The Queen Elizabeth Story [1950], a gentle, charmingly written story with an element of fantasy and a pervading sweetness which bordered on sentimentality. This was the vein of several succeeding stories until suddenly, in Simon [1953] the author found her strength in a brilliant realistic picture of life in the civil wars. In later books she developed her gift for strong vigorous narrative and replaced the sentimentality with an increasing harshness. The Eagle of the Ninth [1954], a story of Roman rule in Britain, and The Shield Ring [1956], which...