Word: costains
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...Historian Arnold Toynbee felt that "One of the traps into which modern scholars seem to me to fall is that they spend their working lives preparing for an imaginary last-judgment examination and keep on missing the moments for action." Thomas B. (The Black Rose) Costain admitted being "not as tolerant in my opinions . . . getting a little antisocial as the years roll on." John Erskine: ". . . I purposely reveal the plot and title of whatever book I am at work on . . . I know that the human mind is rarely capable of repeating the most familiar story with any accuracy five minutes...
...Black Rose (20th Century-Fox] shows how Tyrone Power brought the magnetic compass, the art of papermaking and the secret of gunpowder from far-off Cathay to 13th Century England. Based on Thomas B. Costain's lush historical novel, the film bristles with research, Technicolor, 5,600 extras (not counting 500 horses and 1,000 camels), the English countryside and sun-scorched vistas of Asian deserts. On this broad canvas, however, Scripter Talbot Jennings traces a curiously skimpy design...
HIGH TOWERS (403 pp.)-Thomas B. Costain-Doubleday...
After nibbling at High Towers, a reader might well conclude that Author Costain, who is an old hand at whipping up best-selling bonbons about the past (The Black Rose; The Moneyman), no longer has his heart in his work. In this surprisingly sedate historical romance, little blood is spilled, the solitary battle is brief and tame, and not a single damsel is seduced...
Toward the end Author Costain tries to liven things up a bit. Félicité is dragged by her ankles, with her pretty thighs exposed, by her brutal nobleman husband whom she has been forced to marry, is beaten by him with a cudgel "not thicker than a man's thumb," and is kidnaped by Indians. This, presumably, is what readers of this kind of novel have been waiting for, but it is a long wait, and they are in for further dull stretches before virtue and justice at last prevail...