Saladin

Today, a muscular Richard the Lionheart still sits manfully astride his warhorse, sword held aloft, outside the Houses of Parliament, courtesy of Carlo Marochetti’s 1856 statue of the Plantagenet king. Richard would have approved. As Heather Blurton points out in her livelybook, he was never shy of portraying himself as a valiant monarch – one who actively created his own legend. But first comes a potted history of the man. Incongruously, it is presented as an Introduction, though it accounts for about a fifth of this short book. It is no surprise that Richard achieved heroic status in his lifetime – much to his gratification. His life was packed with

I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather than the wider public, the grand narrative history is something which general readers will applaud and enjoy. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, to give him the full honours, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldiers and is steeped in the history of the Middle East. There is no doubting the pivotal nature of the