We really get an impression of the weirdness for the people of the time, living through the collapse of Roman civilisation, abandonment, cities falling into ruin, roaming gangs, the rise and fall of warlords, and then the period when the country was full of remains of a magnificent past, monuments so sophisticated they must have been left by wizards or giants. The book is occasionally verbose, but what appeals is his poetic evocation of ruined landscapes mired in the forgotten past. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. It's written with a sceptical and historical eye so there's a lot of 'perhaps' in here, which is better than false certainty. Though the author is a critic of Bede and Gildas as well, making me look at those authors differently and reading all the notes because of it which took some time.

This book focuses on the “Lost realms” of Britain, those that we know less of, smaller kingdoms that came and went alongside more well-known places that tend to hog the limelight due to the fact we know way more about them and that they were larger and longer established (think the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex).This is a book about those lands and peoples who fell by the wayside: the lost realms of early medieval Britain. This is the world of Arthur and Urien, Bede and Taliesin; of the Picts and Britons and Saxon migration; of magic and war, myth and miracle.

They style is great too, very lively, with a couple of exceptionally good jokes including one that had me swearing and posting on Bluesky. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.In Lost Realms Thomas Williams uncovers the forgotten origins and untimely demise of Britain’s ancient kingdoms: lands that hover in the twilight between history and fable, whose stories hum with gods and miracles, with giants and battles and ruin.

With so few facts to make generalisations, the author appears happy to meander off-topic, for example to discuss differences between the calculation of the date of Easter between Roman and British Christians. The over all effect, and 'horny relish' is a good example, is of a style that sounds like the worse kind of tv history sacrificing accuracy for sound bites. He was a curator of the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend in 2014 and is now Curator of Early Medieval Coins at the British Museum. Williams] is just brilliant at bringing them to light' Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a new epic history of our forgotten past. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook).Maybe the book is trying to do too many things other than simply tell the history of the small kingdoms that flourished in the years following the fifth century? If you are interested in Britain’s history from the Romans to the Vikings, then you will like this book. Adding nothing to the information, they sound like they've been shoe horned in from an over written memoire written by someone with literary aspirations.