Word: duggan
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...Lady for Ransom, by Alfred Duggan. The twilight of the Byzantine Empire, caught in a fine historical novel (TIME...
...writer of historical novels, Englishman Alfred Duggan (The Little Emperors) is out of step with most of the others in his business; he 1) follows history, instead of twisting it to fit his story; 2) is steeped in his subject but does not smell of the library; and 3) keeps sex in its place. Duggan's penalty is that his novels have scant chance to become U.S. bestsellers. His satisfaction on the other hand, can be that he is writing some of the best historicals to be had nowadays-historical which are also good novels...
...Duggan's Lady for Ransom is told in the first person by an 11th century soldier-turned-monk who never raises his voice. In a Byzantine Empire setting in which rape and pillage were as common as piety, Author Duggan does not muster enough sex-and-sadism scenes to outfit a single chapter of many historicals. He simply tells a fine story full of color and action, informed with a sense of history as pervasive as it is unobtrusive. Professors trying to explain how the Turks were able to wallop the Christian armies of Byzantium could do much worse...
Orderly Confusion. Author Duggan tells his tale with a fine authority that loses nothing from being quiet. His battle scenes are the more exciting because he knows how to describe confusion in orderly language. And always he writes as a man of the times he describes...
...moral and political decay of the Byzantine Empire spreads like a cancer as his story progresses, but Duggan is moved neither to sentimental sermons nor to tedious explanations borrowed from some textbook. He knows, and makes the reader know, that after all. he writes of a day in which "if the officers are killed the men retire, in good order, towards the nearest wine-casks...