In W.B. Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a testing allusion emerges amid a scene of nightmare:
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye
‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up
‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’
More about de Molay, last master of the Knights Templar, can be found in Dan Jones’s new blockbuster on the crusading order, along with quite a few monstrous familiar images. Jones states from the outset his noble intention: to write ‘a book that will entertain as well as inform’. In this he has hitherto had great success; his two spectacular chronicles, The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, traced that dynasty from the White Ship to Bosworth Field, and threw in some Tudors for good measure.
He now tackles ‘the most famous military order in the world’, whose two-century history occupies a stage that stretches ‘from Dublin to Famagusta’.
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