Miss Renault's historical novels are excellent. They hold their own as artistically wrought and moving stories and they are rich in the adult entertainment which is the special province of historical fiction. They are particularly welcome because they illuminate uncharted but essential passages and epochs in the formative stages of our civilization.

In "The Last of the Wine," her first historical novel,… Miss Renault showed how certain personal relationships and the practice of infanticide which we find distasteful and abhorrent could be an integral element in the luminous period of the Peloponnesian War. Now in "The King Must Die" she contributes a greater increment to our knowledge of our past and ourselves by clarifying grimmer and more horrifying elements in the mistier antecedents of the classical efflorescence….

Miss Renault has shaped a consistent and sympathetic personality [Theseus] whose driving ambition is to suppress the barbarism of the old...