The reviews are starting to come in for The Man Who Stopped the Sultan but this one, from Amazon in America, is possibly my favourite review:
Michael P Heller
An Amazing – and Entertaining – Work of History
March 13, 2026
I am writing this review not just as a medieval re-enactor of the Knights of St. John the Hospitallers, but as a re-enactor of Gabriele Tadino himself: This book was a Godsend. Even after having long-studied the life of Tadino for my role, this book contained information that I still never knew, written in a way that is both informative and entertaining. Too many history texts are dry and filled with facts that put you to sleep after only a few pages, whereas Albert has the rare ability to educate the reader and entertain him at the same time. If you are at all interested in medieval history, or medieval warfare, I recommend this book 100%.
Although written a century ago, this book does an excellent, and often drily witty, job of guiding the reader through the transformations in warfare that occurred at this time. An excellent overview of the subject.
Not many books make me completely reconsider a poem I thought I knew well, but Amy Jeffs does this in Wild. She takes the Old English poem, ‘The Wife’s Lament’, and presents it in an entirely new and fascinating light. Her treatments of other medieval poems are equally interesting, complemented by the beautiful woodcuts. A short book but one to linger over.
Back when I was young, when I decided to educate myself because my school certainly wasn’t doing anything towards my education, one of the tools I used to do so was the Longman Companion to English Literature. The Companion pointed me towards writers I would never have read (although I remember the intense disappointment my 15-year-old self felt when I turned to its entry to JRR Tolkien and found him dismissed in a few lines). I owe W Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to its advice and judgement. The edition I had did not mention an editor, but the editor’s tone was unmistakeable: precise, terse and, where he thought warranted, laconically dismissive. The best example of this was his judgement of Kipling’s novel, The Light that Failed: ‘itself a failure’. That I should remember that so many years later tells the impact it had on my young literary imagination.
But in the years since, I have learned that literary judgement, particularly from those entrusted with maintaining the canon, is often not to be trusted. Besides, at that point I had only read Kipling’s Jungle Book (which I loved). Since then, I have read most of his other books, and my appreciation and admiration of his writing has only grown. So, I thought I would turn to the only novel of his that I have not yet read, warned off by that magisterial dismissal read in my youth. I read The Light That Failed and… I must admit that the Companion was quite right: it is itself a failure.
However, it is an interesting failure. It has all Kipling’s abiding interest in the society of men who work together, in this case the new brand of reporter, the war correspondent. It has his facility with dialogue, an uncharacteristic interest in the philosophy of art and what it means to be an artist, which presumably was one of the few occasions when Kipling the man coincided with Kipling the writer, and a profound ability to describe and write of children.
But the story itself. Well, that doesn’t really hold up. Two orphan children, brought up by an unsympathetic foster carer, pledge undying love, then grow up. He goes off, becomes a war artist, returns and finds her, struggling to be an artist herself. She is determined to be an artist, a good artist, but she isn’t and he is. She refuses him to concentrate on her art. An old wound makes him lose his sight. She returns to find him blind. She leaves him. He stumbles blindly back to his old friends, the war correspondents, and dies, shot in battle. The end.
As a love story, it fails. As a picaresque story, it fails. As a portrayal of public-school male friendship during the late Victorian era, it succeeds. But, the thing is, Kipling’s failure is still better than most other writer’s successes, so I am still glad I read it. And I will take on board what he says is necessary to actually produce true art.
You could subtitle this book: The Punishment of the Ordinary. In almost every story a normal person is living his life just like millions of other ordinary people when something extra-ordinary happens to him – and there is nothing he can do to escape his fate. Because the extra-ordinary does not manifest itself as something miraculous or exalting but rather as something that destroys and obliterates. Occasionally, the protagonist does, just about, manage to escape the onrushing juggernaut of fate, of which the best example is ‘Duel’ where a travelling salesman driving cross country is tracked by a psychotic truck driver intent on pulverising his little car (Steven Spielberg turned this into a film). But, more often, there is nothing that can be done to escape. Nemesis comes to the innocent. Perhaps that’s the point. In this world, no one is truly innocent. Everyone is tainted but most of us veil ourselves in cloaks of unearned righteousness. Matheson’s tales strip away that pretension. Although not in any sense religious stories, there is an underlying sense, which Matheson was probably completely unaware of, that all are fallen, all are corrupt besides the supernatural holiness of the divine. Simply being ordinary and normal is no armour against the dark old forces of the universe should they turn, for whatever reason, their weary gaze upon you.
There’s not many books out there that tell the history of Sri Lanka, and none that do it so succinctly. So I must compliment Mr Newmont on first writing his history and, secondly, doing such a good job of it. The first half of the book is a brisk run through the country’s ancient past. Those unfamiliar with the hydraulic and architectural wonders achieved by Sri Lanka’s ancient kings will learn enough here to whet their appetite to learn more.
The second half takes us from the first western colonists, the Portugues, through Dutch and British rule, to the final chapters that do an excellent, and fair, job of giving the history of Sri Lanka’s post-independence travails. A great introduction to the subject.
I’m fortunate enough to count Al, his wife, Marie, and son, Jared, as friends. They also all three appear in this book, which is essentially Al’s memoir of his life, mainly as a pastor and minister. It’s been a privilege to know all three of them, both for their friendship but also for their disabusing me of some stereotypes that I had long held.
In London, as in the rest of Europe, there’s a sort of horrified fascination with America that pervades our media and public life. The BBC will send plane loads of journalists to cover US presidential elections while barely mentioning the presidential elections in France – which probably affect us even more than what happens in America. But amid all this coverage, one thing remains true: the barely disguised contempt with which America’s Bible Belt Christians are portrayed.
Now, I must confess to falling prey to this stereotype myself. But then, I met Al, and Marie, and Jared. Al is actually a Protestant pastor. While we haven’t specifically talked politics, I’m sure he’s socially conservative and probably politically Republican too. He even, I found out in his book, hunts! You’d be hard put to find someone who ticks more of the stereotype boxes.
Yet Al, and his family, are the very opposite of the ignorant, uncivilised, parochial stereotype of Protestant American Christians that we get served up all the time in Britain. They have more advanced degrees between them than most families have relatives and so far as parochial is concerned, they’ve travelled more than me – and I’ve been to a lot of countries. As a family, they love learning, in all its forms, and they also sponsor and help others wanting to learn.
They are, in fact, what a truly civilised family should be. Yet they are white American Christian hunters (for goodness sake, I learned that even Marie, one of the kindest ladies I’ve ever met, enjoys hunting!).
So while I thank them for their friendship, I also thank them for removing the blinkers of prejudice from my gaze.
You’ve gone with the family for a picnic into the countryside. You park the car, walk a mile or so to a scenic spot, lay out the picnic…and then the heavens open. At first you try to tough it out but there’s no sign of the rain abating and, sooner rather than later, you give up and trudge back to the car, damp and hungry. But, of course, in the rain and confusion, you didn’t clear up as you might have. A sandwich box fell out of the bag. A glass bottle was left open on the floor. Some paper, some plastic wrappers, some of the food that you’d started eating and maybe even an old MP3 player, forgotten in all the confusion.
You pile back into the car and resolve, on the way back, to try a country pub next time. But as you drive away, the creatures that live around that scenic spot look out from their hiding places. They look around, checking that you’ve gone. Then, some of the bolder ones, creep forward and start investigating what you left behind. A sparrow makes off with the crumbs from the sandwich. A bee discovers the spilt Coke and gorges on sugar until it collapses in a sugar faint. An ant crawls into the open glass bottle and gets stuck there, the sides too smooth for it to climb back out, while its comrades wave their feelers at it from outside, entirely unable to rescue it.
That’s the premise of the Strugatsky brother’s novel – only we’re the ants, the bee and the sparrow. Aliens, so far beyond us that they don’t even notice we’re here, land on earth, spend a short time here, and then leave – leaving stuff behind. Some of it is dangerous, some useful, some incomprehensible.
Science fiction is a literature of ideas and this, at the time wholly original idea, is perhaps the best attempt to describe what a real alien visit might be like. As such, the novel is almost extraneous to the idea, serving largely to showcase the idea. The idea itself has proved very powerful, entering the SF vocabulary. The novel from which it came is suitably indeterminate because the visit was indeterminate: true to the idea perhaps slightly less satisfactory as literature. But, in SF, the story serves the idea, not the other way round.
Folk tales. Stories told by people and then retold and retold, and told again. Sadly, many of these old stories are teetering on the edge of forgetting, the old aural culture that kept the stories alive itself being on the edge of oblivion. So it’s just as well that story tellers such as Malcolm Green have been collecting these stories and writing them down, that they not be lost entirely.
What’s particularly interesting is how some narratives recur, modified to suit local settings but still telling essentially the same story whether that be in Cornwall or Northumberland. One good example, which Green includes in his book, is the tale of the young man selling a horse who is taken under the hill and sees there sleeping knights and great treasures and, on a table, a sword and a horn. He is told to either draw the sword or sound the horn. If he chooses correctly, then all the treasure shall be his. But should he choose wrongly, then the sleeping knights will wake and he be pursued by them.
What’s interesting is that some versions of the story have the young man drawing the sword while in others he sounds the horn but whichever he chooses, he is always wrong. So, should you find yourself under a hill, surrounded by sleeping knights and glittering treasure, and faced with this choice, then the only way to win seems to be not to play the game at all: I’d suggest pocketing a few diamonds while buying some time and then asking for the way out!
The stories are excellently told; a worthy addition to any library of folk tales.
This is strange. It’s a full-length epic poem about Jason and the quest for the golden fleece – only it’s not really epic and hardly ever heroic. The clue might be in the metre in which the poem was written: rather than the heroic metres of Homer or Virgil, it was written in a metre that was generally reserved for hymnody and lyric. So maybe Apollonius never intended to write an epic, but rather a long lyric or hymn. Indeed, most of the content is actually travel, long descriptions of where the Argonauts go, with the descriptions often being stripped down to list of places visited.
As for Jason and his argonauts, they are the less heroic bunch of heroes ever put into metre. Presumably other earlier versions of the legend (which have sadly all been lost) painted them in a more epic light; surely they must have done because it’s hard to see how this bunch of perpetually moaning adventurers could have come to be seen as among the greatest of the Classical heroes if this is how they behaved in all the tellings of the story. Indeed, Jason does little more than complain and have repeated fits of fear about what lies before them throughout the story. The accomplishment of the quest is mainly down to Medea, who is nevertheless berated for betraying her psychotic father.
It’s not as if the rest of the Argonauts are any braver and more resolute than Jason. They too go into palpitations at the prospect of any danger. The only exception is Heracles, but he is removed from the quest early on and the rest have to carry on without him, carried to the successful conclusion of the quest largely by the efforts of others.
It really is a very strange epic. Excellent translation by the wonderfully named Aaron Poochigian though.
