Robert Irwin

Onward Christian Soldiers

Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades

By

The Bodley Head 424pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Holy Warriors has plenty of competition. There must be about a dozen general histories of the crusades in print and the standard is pretty high. Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway College, London University, has not written an academic textbook. As he explains in the introduction, he has aimed his book at the general reader and ‘chosen to bring to life a variety of figures and events outside of those well known to a general audience’. It is Phillips’s focus on the personalities and picturesque incidents, and his neglect of any attempt to slog year by year through the annals of the crusades, that distinguish this book from the others. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us