Jonathan Sumption
After Agincourt
Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, 1417–1450
By Juliet Barker
Little, Brown 485pp £20 order from our bookshop
The wars of the English in fifteenth-century France have never found their historian. In England, the stigma of failure hangs over the whole period: a tale of triumphant beginnings, followed by missed opportunities, unrealistic ambitions, discord, treachery and greed. Shakespeare has always seemed a better read. Even in France, Charles VII has proved to be an unlikely hero. Branded as a murderer at the outset of his public career, the French king was indolent, unmilitary and periodically vicious. The fact that he was intermittently well-advised and fortunate in his enemies has done little to redeem him.
This book is the sequel to Juliet Barker’s much admired history of the Battle of Agincourt, which was published in 2005. But it is a different kind of book about a different kind of war. The Agincourt campaign was an epic of adversity and triumph, extending over barely
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind