A. L. Rowse
Duty and pleasure combined make me give the first place to Miss M. St. C. Byrne's edition of The Lisle Letters (Chicago University Press). These now beat the famous Paston Letters for pride of place. They are concentrated within a decade, 1530-1540, are more dramatic, and deal with more interesting people, the whole court of Henry VIII. They are like a verbal transcript of Holbein's drawings of its denizens.
Charles Thomas's Christianity in Roman Britain to A.D.500 (Batsford) is a first-class work of scholarship in this elusive but important field. And it is brilliantly written by one who is not only a master archaeologist but a man of wide culture.
Susan Chitty's Gwen John (Hodder) gave me something different from my usual field. Though I have long admired this painter — and regard Augustus John, whom I knew, as absurdly depreciated — I knew nothing of his sister's extraordinary life, here portrayed with sympathy and insight.
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