4.5 Conquered StarsI drew close and whispered, "I love you, Alexander," and kissed him. Never mind, I thought, from whom his heart accepts it. Let it be according to his wish. My hair had fallen on his breast. His eyes opened; his hand moved, and touched a strand, and ran it between his fingers.H...
I cannot remember how I discovered Mary Renault’s novels, but most likely at my local library which I haunted. Although I read them all as a teenager, many years ago, their beauty and humanity are still a strong influence. While The King Must Die and the Alexandrian books may have had a stronger ...
The past, they say, is a foreign country. One might even go so far as to say that it is another world full of strange wonders and people who both fascinate and repel. I imagine that is why history so intrigues me and I definitely approach the subject with a heaping portion of romance as I in no w...
Rating: 4* of fiveThe Publisher Says: In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of...
Alexander has always been a mystery to me. To be honest, I've always been a bit frustrated with his legacy. We tend to picture Alex as the beautiful, idealized conquering hero in a way that we never would with someone like Attila the Hun. For most of my life my theory on why this is has been rela...
4.5 starsMary Renault’s _The Bull from the Sea_ takes up where The King Must Die left off and continues the legendary story of Theseus and his kingship of Attica. There are some differences between this volume and its predecessor, most notably in the fact that the scope of this tale is much broad...
I was severely disappointed in this novel, by an author whose classically-themed books I enjoyed. I actually read the Virago 2005 reprint, which contains the Afterword by the author herself, but no other commentary.The story concerns the timid, repressed Elsie Lane's great adventure in running aw...
Don't read the Author's Note at the end. Spoiler Alerts had not been invented yetAs someone with only a passing knowledge of the life and times of Alexander the Great, he lived in Greece a few hundred years before Christ and conquered lands from Egypt to Afghanistan, I was happy to discover this ...
This was my first Mary Renault novel and I loved it a lot. I read everyone's praises of her extraordinary ability to describe places from thousands of years ago like she had been there, and I agree wholeheartedly. The 400 B.C. Greece comes to life on the pages of this novel. It is so seamless, so...
On holiday in the North Devon countryside, Neil Langton looks back on the wreckage of his past. He has come to believe that all happiness is behind him; the wounds from his former marriage - in which his wife cheated on him and his young daughter died - are still raw. While rock-climbing, he meet...
Kit Anderson is married to Janet, a beautiful but narcissistic woman who seems more shallow to him as time goes by. Their relationship has become strained and cold. Immersing himself in his work as a doctor, Anderson takes consolation in his career. Then, one night he is called out to a dying pa...
The decisions of that last evening had carried with them, at the time, the sense of hauling on a slack rope which is one of life’s quiet intimations of irony. No crisis confronted her. She merely developed Julian s cold. It was the kind of cold which wet-blankets every activity of body and mind, ...
He had asked her for some time to promise him her first free night; but she had not, till now, reached the necessary pitch of indifference to herself. She would have been willing enough to make herself useful to anyone who really needed her—it would have given her life a brief appearance of meani...
said Reg. “That run you into something, I reckon. Saloon bar stuff.” “Bit of free. A party at someone’s flat.” “Ah. Nice girls?” “Fine.” If only one had notice of these questions, Laurie thought. The answer that seemed to save trouble on the spur of the moment hardly ever did. Sure enough, a few ...
He had settled down to work before he missed his pipe or remembered where he had left it; and had found, as usual, that cigarettes were not the same. Scarcely detaching his mind from that of the character on whom he was working, he had pushed off in the punt to get it, thinking as he went, and co...