The Fire & The Rose

Collins, 1966. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 6" x 8.75. h/b 320 pages, condition is very good, minor edge wear to the DJ. The admiration and esteem in which Sir Arthur Bryant has so long been held by so large a public is primarily due to the quality he shares with such illustrious predecessors among English historians as Gibbon, Macaulay and Trevelyan - his mastery of the art of narrative. Like them he has not only sought by diligent examination of the facts to tell truly what happened, but to tell it vividly and dramatically so that it may live for his readers as it has lived for him. In this volume he has compiled a sequence, spanning seven centuries, from the corpus of his work to isolate this element of it; the unforgettable, decisive events to which only the born story-teller could do justice are presented apart from the detailed mass of political, economic, social, legal and religious' facts which were their original context. Partly re-written to put them in their wider setting of continuing time and give the book unity, here are nine dramatic contests of will in which the contenders stake their all, including their life', and in so doing join the immortal company of saga and epic. Many will have read one or more of them, though few may have read them all; but it is hard to imagine any for whom they will not make exciting reading - most of all perhaps for the hundreds and thousands who are offered the favourite passages chosen by himself, of their favourite historian.