A tale of suspense

This account of a public execution in Wales is a delightful book. Beautifully designed, it is by that rare bird, an academic who not only can write but also seems to have had in mind what the French historian meant, if I remember the quote, when he mourned, ‘My book is long because I have neither the time nor the wit to make it short.’ Professor Bartlett’s 168 pages are thus more readable than most thrillers. But its most extraordinary feature is something no one ever thought to encounter until some kind of time travel was invented: in The Hanged Man men and women long dead (and, in one case, resurrected) walk and talk across 800 years.

The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie said that if you wanted to know what life in the Middle Ages was really like you had only to look in the vast and largely unresearched archives of the Vatican, in particular its reports into heresy and into candidacies for sainthood.