Troilus And Criseyde – Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1382-1387 [Translation by Nevill Coghill, 1971] ★★★★½

Love's Misfortune, Straddling Time

It’s a case of being almost too enjoyable to read without drawing some guilt. This is Chaucer, yet a boldly modern translation. It lays out medieval thinking and customs in a smooth way while delivering a crackling good story. If only it felt less easy going down.

Nevill Coghill’s translation leans into the modern idiom, recasting the 14^th century narrative poem with some 20^th century expressions like “Nuts” and “that makes them tick.” At the same time, the poem’s rhythms and expressive discourse are recognizably direct from Chaucer, here coming into full form as the premier English writer of his time.

The bones of the poem remain: In ancient Troy a hero named Troilus and a widow maiden named Criseyde fall in love while their city is besieged by angry Greeks. After a period of pursuit and apparent despair by Troilus, the two achieve a blissfully erotic union only to find their romance becoming another victim of war.

Sir Thomas More – Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle & others, c. 1596-1604 ★½

Shakespeare by Committee

If you accept prevailing wisdom, it is nothing short of a miracle we have this play. It presents a famously controversial episode in British history when deadly turmoil from that controversy still raged. For centuries the play was buried from public view, seemingly lost forever.

Most incredibly, the original play manuscript includes handwritten lines by William Shakespeare, who composed at least most of one scene. Handwriting experts are convinced, anyway; so are many leading Shakespearean scholars.

So why is Sir Thomas More so hard to get excited about? Is it just because the play is mostly not by Shakespeare? Or is it just because it’s mostly not by anyone?

Rossetti: His Life And Works – Evelyn Waugh, 1928 ★★½

Making a Splash

In his own lifetime, Evelyn Waugh tells us, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was “the bogey of many Victorian drawing-rooms,” scandalizing society with his splashy, vibrant paintings. Few then were ready to appreciate a true romantic who brought a new way of thinking about art and life.

His Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists blended hyper-realistic detail with medieval-inspired treatments, resulting in a highly individualized style which remains unique and widely admired. While often messy when came to personal matters like money and women, Rossetti was the right artist to challenge a stale period for British culture.

Waugh found this still true nearly a half-century after Rossetti’s death: “By no means the least of the advantages to be gained from a study of Rossetti is the stimulus it gives to one’s restiveness in an era of competent stultification,” he writes.

Roman Britain: Outpost Of The Empire – H. H. Scullard, 1979 ★★½

Ruling Britannia

Long before Great Britain became the world’s greatest empire, it was for 400 years a colony of another empire called Rome. What did Rome ever do for the British? Plenty, according to H. H. Scullard, including introducing moldboards to plows, paving to roads, and cats to homes.

There was also the creation of cities, specifically one at the mouth of the Thames River known today as London. If it wasn’t for war, famine, and slavery, all of which all had existed before the Romans came, one can see why the British regarded their colonization to be a blessing.

Especially when it was all over in a relative blink of an eye.

Tune In: The Beatles – All These Years, Vol. 1 – Mark Lewisohn, 2013 ★★★★

Waiting for Ringo

The truly fab thing about this book is how close Mark Lewisohn makes you feel to the Beatles, not as a musical legacy or cultural institution, but human beings you get to know better than just about anyone you will ever meet.

Yet it keeps reminding me of that old maxim: never meet your heroes.

To put it plainly, these guys played rough pushing their way to “the toppermost of the poppermost.” Most people picking this book up will know the sad tale of Pete Best, but many others were used and discarded for much less cause. “The Beatles weren’t sentimental types,” Lewisohn writes, in his typically understated way.

Das Reich – Max Hastings, 1981 ★★½

When Evil Got Taken Too Far

Can the end justify the means even when those means are wholly evil? Leaving aside moral, philosophical, and theological quibbles, can one look at wholesale murder from the perspective of getting something done and call it wrong simply on the basis of logic?

Yes, you can. Take the actions of a German SS armored division who, in order to cow rebellious French civilians en route to Normandy in June 1944, committed two massacres and numerous atrocities to gain a clear road to the front line.

This they did, proving in an immediate way the efficacy of terror as a tool of war, but also the limitations of same, for reasons explained by Max Hastings in this 1981 account of the division’s bloody march.

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King – Robert E. Howard, 2005 ★★★

Requiem for a Forgotten Race

There is much to love in this collection of short fiction and poetry centered around a doomed race of pre-Celtic warriors, but mainly if you are a fan of the author going in.

Underneath Robert E. Howard the professional pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s was a fighting primitive who rebelled against civilized constraints even though he knew he could only lose. In that light, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, from the classy continuing series of Howard story collections published by Del Ray, presents Howard in his element.

People who love Howard will want this book, for the different ways it highlights one of the writer’s signature characters, Bran Mak Morn, and more at the core, the Pictish race from which he sprang. But as Spinal Tap’s manager once said, their appeal is selective.

Waverley – Walter Scott, 1814 ★★★

Putting on the Plaid

History is full of accidents. For example, this novel. If not for a missing tackle box, no one would ever have gotten to read it.

In the preface to his 1829 edition of Waverley, Walter Scott explains how he wrote the first few chapters of this, gave it up, and put the manuscript in a garret room where he kept lumber. Poking around said room trying to find a tackle box to lend to a friend, he came across the manuscript, read it, was surprised to enjoy it, and decided to finish it.

And thus history, or rather historical fiction, came to be.

Edmund Campion: A Life – Evelyn Waugh, 1935 ★★½

A Saint in Shackles

Evelyn Waugh doesn’t exactly exude humble piety. His fiction sneers with acid contempt at the foibles of his fellow man. So a serious, earnest, ever-so-respectful biography from this famous cynic about a saint martyred over 350 years before is a bit of a detour.

Waugh was Catholic; it is part of his legend. But mostly his faith is a matter of being against things: modern architecture, sex outside marriage, loud parties, and so on. Edmund Campion: A Life is a rare occasion for seeing Waugh putting forward faith as positive action.

As a book, it is minor Waugh. But as a glimpse at what made Waugh tick, Edmund Campion engages and reveals between its lulls.

Paradise Lost – John Milton, 1667-1674 ★★★★

Eve of Destruction

Literature is a subjective medium, so defining greatness in it is tricky. Time makes this trickier; one generation’s masterpiece might just leave their descendants dazed and confused. Scholars are Beowulf’s main audience now; does anyone still read Pilgrim’s Progress?

Paradise Lost had a time capsule feel not long after its creation. Religiously, John Milton’s Puritan form of Christianity had already fallen out of favor in his homeland by the time of its publication; stylistically, its use of blank verse was even more out-of-step.

Why then, has it mattered as long and as deeply as it does?

King John – William Shakespeare, c. 1596 ★★½

When Ruthlessness Fails

The more I read Shakespeare’s history plays, the more I feel I am watching a debate between the author and another Renaissance legend, Niccolò Machiavelli, over what constitutes effective leadership.

Is it better to be loved or feared? Is religion a useful prop, or something more meaningful and lasting? Is there such a thing as being too ruthless, or can one only err on the side of mercy?

Time and again, Machiavelli clearly states one thing; Shakespeare gently suggests quite another. Take Shakespeare’s King John.

Journey’s End – R. C. Sherriff, 1928 ★★★★

Where Poppies Blow

War is hell. A hell of a bore, for one thing. Imagine endless days sitting in a trench somewhere while the rain and muck and rats have at you, trying to think of anything to take your mind off the prospect of sudden, violent death. Maybe even getting numb from it after awhile.

World War I had a reputation for that, on account of the long-static lines of the Western Front and the work of writers who survived, men on both sides including R. C. Sherriff, who ten years after getting wounded in combat wrote a play about both the dying and the waiting.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century – Barbara Tuchman, 1978 ★½

All Pain, No Gain

War, plague, poverty, religious doubt, the rich being totally evil and getting away with it… If you think this century has it bad, just imagine all that in the 1300s. Barbara Tuchman takes us through the ordeal of life in Europe just before the Renaissance; the result is pretty painful.

Also messy, confusing, and not at all fun to read. In fact, this is Tuchman at her toughest and most pedantic, a book lacking a thesis or character to latch onto.

Tuchman offers snark instead, lots of it: “If the fiction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent, it did not, any more than other models that man has made for himself, transform human nature.”

With Rommel In The Desert – Heinz Werner Schmidt, 1951 ★★½

Running with the Fox

During its brief lifespan, victory and defeat were close companions for the German Afrika Korps. Experiencing both firsthand was one young officer who would fight on the front lines and ride in a staff car with the unit’s legendary commander, Erwin Rommel, a. k. a. the Desert Fox.

As a memoir, With Rommel In The Desert offers color and a fair amount of candor, but is a loss when it comes to context or depth. If you grew up like me watching World War II movies or TV shows like “The Rat Patrol,” this is engaging if somewhat breezy and episodic.

Despite the title, Rommel is a background figure most of the time.

Red Duster, White Ensign: The Story Of Malta And The Malta Convoys – Ian Cameron, 1960 ★★★

Steaming against the Odds

For want of a nail, the boot was lost. New life got breathed into a tired old adage in 1943 when the failure to secure a narrow island fortress just off the coast of Sicily wound up costing the Axis the entire Mediterranean and that biggest and most famous of boots, Italy.

How did British naval forces and the people of Malta, then a Crown colony, pull off this amazing upset? Ian Cameron lays out just how close matters came to falling Hitler’s way.

Henry V – William Shakespeare, c. 1599 ★½

Not Wild about Harry

King Henry V combines strident jingoism, weak comedy, structural instability, and some of Shakespeare’s dullest blank verse.

It also presents us with a windy protagonist who bears little resemblance to the saucy, shifting Prince Hal of the Henry IV plays. I find it a pain reading Henry V, except when the king is offstage, when it gets even more annoying.

What do so many other people see in this play anyway?

The Biafra Story – Frederick Forsyth, 1969 [Revised 2001] ★½

Who Mourns for Biafra?

They call them crimes against humanity, but do they count if not everyone admits they are crimes?

This was the problem facing a young British journalist who had what seemed to be a huge story in his hands, one where millions of helpless civilians were killed. But to many of his colleagues, and his own government, the deaths were unfortunate byproducts of settled policy.

Who mourns for Biafra? This becomes a question without an answer, and a cry which permeates each page of this angry, difficult book.

Henry IV, Part II – William Shakespeare, c. 1597-98 ★★★

Tubby Takes a Hike

For decades, if not longer, many critics have argued that what you get in Henry IV, Part II is not a sequel but a clone.

Certainly you see Shakespeare reacting to the success of his first Henry IV play by giving audiences more of the same. More rebel plotting, more Prince Henry antagonizing the squares, and especially more hijinks from Sir John Falstaff, who proved a comic sensation in his debut.

Henry IV, Part I – William Shakespeare, c. 1597 ★★★★½

A Prince by any Other Name

There is a Shakespeare quote that springs to mind when reading Henry IV, Part I, but not from that play. Rather, it’s from As You Like It.

“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…”

In Henry IV, Part I, that man is Prince Henry, heir to the throne held by our title character. The Prince will play many parts in the course of his career, most notably two he develops in tandem here: a dissolute ruffian inspired by his friendship with the disgraced Sir John Falstaff; and a bold knight modeled on Hotspur, who leads an army against his father.

Richard II – William Shakespeare, c. 1595 ★★★★

Bad King Makes Bad Choices

Kicking off the second and more famous of William Shakespeare’s “Henriad” history plays, The Tragedy Of Richard II makes the most sense when read after the three plays which chronologically follow it: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V.

That’s because while this play is concerned with the same basic question, how to be a good king, it does by presenting a type of worst-case scenario the kings of the later plays take pains to avoid.

That is after the first of these Henrys caused the problem leading to that scenario. Or did he? Welcome to the conundrum that is Richard II.