Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s in postwar Britain, Henry Treece wrote of the turning points of British and Scandinavian history--or, as he liked to call them, "crossroads." Treece's career as a writer for children spanned barely a dozen years, but in this short period he produced more than thirty novels for young readers as well as several works of nonfiction. During the same years Treece also published a dozen books for adult readers and many scripts, for radio and live performance, that have never been published. His output is especially impressive considering the fact that, until the last seven years of his life, Treece was a full-time schoolmaster. Like his fellow historical novelists Rosemary Sutcliff and Geoffrey Trease, he sought to replace a merely sentimental, simplistic view of empire with a rendition of history in which good and bad were intertwined; like them, he fought against the...