For those who submit willingly to magic, Rosemary Sutcliff's new novel, The Mark of the Horse Lord, will cast its spell no less powerfully than any of her books since The Eagle of the Ninth. This is her fifteenth book for children, the flowering since 1950 of a remarkable talent which enchants readers old and young, exercises critics, and makes irrelevant the notion that the historical novel is barely concealed didacticism or an escape from the difficulty of writing for adolescents about contemporary problems. Miss Sutcliff's books have an organic unity which sets them apart from the extrovert 'good yarn' or historical fiction, and they make no concessions to ideas of what is a suitable book for children. (p. 249)

Timid as they now seem, her early books are not without significance, especially as historical stories for the under-tens are thin on the ground. The Chronicles of Robin Hood, The...