A dreadful victory

The trouble with great historical narratives is the volume of detail they demand: tidal waves of personal and place names, of dates and sums of money, of CVs, menus, fashion notes, light brown hair and glacial moraines, which after 25 pages remind the untrained reader of the showing and telling of holiday snaps. Yet history without detail is worse than hot air, just a deflated party balloon caught on a hawthorn tree. Details have not merely to be included, but used as crampons up the rock-face of past time. Ways and means to ration and present them exist, and the most convenient is the footnote; it is a pity that Dr Barker’s publishers do not seem to have heard of it. They make her squeeze into the text stuff that holds up the narrative, and post shrivelled gobbets of information to the end-notes, where no one can see them. As a result this fine book is too long, and in places it drifts. There was no need to pack the suitcase with so much underwear, such as disquisitions on the lack of maps in the 15th century, on the supposed shape of the world, or on the variety of mediaeval dating systems; or to soothe us with lists of the names of Picard nobles called to arms by the French king, euphonious as they are: ‘the sires de Croy, de Waurin, de Fosseux, de Creqy, de Helchin, de Brimeu, de Mausnes, de la Viefville, de Inchi, de Beaufort, de Noielle and de Neufville’. It’s all right for Proustians, but hardly as essential as the excursions on heraldry, weapons and surgery.

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Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

However, this is a tremendous story which will carry most readers through to the end despite the delays. A smaller English army, footsore, sick and starving, was confronted by a huge French force intent on wiping it out, and managed not merely to defeat but virtually to annihilate the flower of the enemy’s military manhood; as if the British expeditionary armies of 1914 or ’39 had stood their ground and destroyed their German opponents.