Daniel Anlezark Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles 310pp. D. S. Brewer. £95. Janet Bately, Joseph C. Harris and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, with Susan Irvine, editors and translators The Old Engl

Best books… Roy Foster The emeritus professor of ...

Collecting fields often have holy grails, and in medieval illuminated manuscripts one is the Roman d’Alexandre or Romance of Alexander. The 20cm-tall book, written in Old French and illustrated with 1

You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a

ny potential reader of A Glastonbury Romance is likely to be put off initially by its sheer size: this brick of a book runs to more than 1,100 pages, containing almost half a million words. Some autho

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