Miss Taylor Caldwell casts her net wide in search of themes and periods for the sort of elaborate fiction she favours…. Nobody need or should despise the amount of work which has gone into the quarter of a million words or so of ["The Arm and the Darkness"]. Regretfully, however, one cannot but wish it had a little more life, a little real substance or individuality. Here, it must be confessed, is rather too much of the stale perfume of historical romance, too much of the faded tinsel, altogether too much of the conventional rhetoric…. Miss Caldwell, though extreme facility has always been her failing, has written better books than this….

The tale, and with it the personality of Richelieu, is much overwritten. Miss Caldwell presents a line of seventeenth-century Protestant criticism that in point of fact is very much out of its time, and she does not...