Less than a fifth of the main text deals with the year itself and its three battles; one of them, Fulford, gets barely two pages and no mention in the index; and the accounts of Stamford Bridge and Hastings add little to what one can read in the several Decisive Battles-type books that are around.Nevertheless his Hastings is very good and captures most graphically what it must have been like, without going beyond the bounds a historian should respect (novelists may quite legitimately be more inventive, so long as they do not claim to be historians), giving an exciting and finally tragic account that I find as moving as accounts of Waterloo. Cunningly, McLynn leaves an analysis of the arrow-in-the-eye controversy to an appendix, giving us the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio version of four killer knights moving in at the end to finish Harold off. Even in the narrow world of fine and applied art they were far superior to the Normans - just compare what little is left (the Normans destroyed most of it) in the way of manuscript illumination, real tapestry, wall-painting, jewellery and so on with the clumsy primitivism of what should be known as the Bayeux Needlework.Without women the Normans had to intermarry, but the two strands remain unreconciled and conflicting right down to the present day, however anglicised the Norman side may seem to be. It took them 300 years to learn a corrupt version of our language, and about as long to build up a rigid class-system, based initially on family and land-owning but was now shored up by attitudes, education, all the rules that operate to ensure that you don't get anywhere in England unless you are prepared to be co-opted, to join the club.So, any book that helps us to understand better how it happened and what it meant is to be welcomed, and, within the parameters he has set himself, Frank McLynn's does just that First, though, a caveat The title is misleading.

What culture they had was a watered-down remnant of the nastier characteristics of their Norse ancestors, combined with a French arrogance already wedded to an arid rationalism and an exaggerated respect for things Roman. The Anglo-Saxon- Danes they conquered were hedonistic, freedom-claiming and freedom-loving, empirical in their approach to life, sceptical about dogma, ready to respect others and not interfere, individualistic. 1066: The Year of the Three Battles by Frank McLynn Cape pounds 18.99 October 14, 1066 remains the most significant date in English history, and speculating about what might have been had the good guys won is far more rewarding than fantasies about storm-troopers in Whitehall. For better or worse - no, for worse - the English we are were made on that day and the English we were destroyed, or compromised. Amazingly, somewhere between 8,000 and 14,000 men (almost no women) split a nation of more than a million with a flourishing culture of its own into two antagonistic halves with dire results for us, our neighbours, and maybe the world.The Normans were ruthless, cruel oppressors, control freaks, committed to hierarchy, bureaucracy, rule from the top.

There are five epigraphs - from Marguerite Yourcenar, Plato, Alasdair Gray, Brian Appleyard and Oscar Wilde Yet the book doesn't sink under all this weight. On the contrary, it is plainly written and fast-paced and has a certain crispness that suggests Bowering resisted indulging her themes beyond the part they had to play in her overall plan.The fast-action plot has a subtle backdrop, raising questions about the flimsiness of identity in the midst of political, economic and social forces. Characters casually lose their name, parents, nationality and home. Location becomes a matter of a dateline or a sighting of the sun. Horror and guilt are remembered in whispers, secrets and dreams, like an atmosphere which everyone is forced to continue to breathe.

is written with such panache and is so much fun to read that it seems churlish to resist its more fantastic moments It is a wonderful piece of storytelling.. His story is a web of catastrophe, politics and romance from the start. It is 1934, and while Albrecht and his friend Nate Bone spy on a neighbour's seance, Nate's baby sister is scalded and dies. The clairvoyant's customer is exposed as Nate's father's lover and we already know that the clairvoyant herself will become involved with Albrecht's father and that Albrecht will marry her daughter, Mary.These families continue to love, betray, abandon and rescue one another through a chain of twists and coincidences that has them popping up like Zelig at key historical moments.

Albrecht's twin, the inscrutable Gerhard, is sent back to Cologne to study music, is enlisted by the Nazis and ends up in a Soviet labour camp. Nate is subject to medical experiments as a POW in Japan while Mary is involved in the development of chemical weapons. Albrecht's account is interspersed with the story of Fika, the surviving member of the Soviet "First All Union Conference of Women" expedition to the North Pole. It is 1960, the height of the Cold War, and Fika heads for the West. Her Arctic world is as featureless as Albrecht's is crowded, measured in glimpses of sunlight, grains of sugar and pulsebeats. Little by little, her memories knit her, too, into his story is fashionably rich in research. We learn about ice, orienteering, germ-warfare, labour camps, meteorites and circuses.