For those who submit willingly to magic, Rosemary Sutcliff's new novel, The Mark of the Horse Lord, will cast its spell no less powerfully than any of her books since The Eagle of the Ninth. This is her fifteenth book for children, the flowering since 1950 of a remarkable talent which enchants readers old and young, exercises critics, and makes irrelevant the notion that the historical novel is barely concealed didacticism or an escape from the difficulty of writing for adolescents about contemporary...

Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth combines the presentation of the historic era of the Roman occupation of Britain with an acute sense of place. A feeling of belonging to a certain landscape becomes a vital part of the plot structure. She portrays remarkably the conflict between the Celtic tribal customs and the Roman way of imposing its own civilization wherever it went. The two elements are finally welded into an inseparable unity by one force of nature—the country itself…. P...

As in an earlier book, "The Eagle of the Ninth," Rosemary Sutcliff paints here a colorful and convincing picture of Roman Britain ["The Silver Branch"], this time in the latter part of the third century. The story begins during the rule of Carausius, and centers on Justin, newly come to Albion to take up his post of junior surgeon. Uneasily aware of intrigue and unrest about him, Justin and his kinsman Flavius, a young centurion, think at first the turmoil is centered in the conf...

With each of her historical stories for older boys and girls, [Rosemary Sutcliff] writes better. Her "Eagle of the Ninth" was a stirring recreation of life in Roman Britain. Keeping to the same period, she now tells [in "Outcast"] an almost equally thrilling tale of a Roman boy brought up as a Briton, then rejected by his tribe, made a slave when he goes back to Rome, and … sent to the galleys. The plot finally takes him back to Britain, the land he truly loves, to find hi...

When the young centurion Marcus Aquila took over his first command in a frontier garrison in ancient Britain his heart was set on a long and glorious military career. He was also determined to find out about his father who had been lost ten years earlier when the Ninth Legion had mysteriously vanished on its way to quell a rebellion in North Britain. A crippling wound in his first battle put an early end to Marcus' military career. How he achieved his second ambition, even to restoring the Eagle, the...

[In "The Capricorn Bracelet" Rosemary Sutcliff] returns to subject matter she treated 20 years ago in her first big novel, "The Eagle of the Ninth." "The Capricorn Bracelet" is a collection of short stories spanning the Roman occupation of Britain from the first to the fifth century. The bracelet, awarded for distinguished military service, affirms the tradition of the Roman Legions….

One of the most interesting writers of children's historical novels today is Rosemary Sutcliff; her new book, The Eagle of the Ninth, seems to me a work of real distinction. It concerns a young Roman's first few years in Britain, and his journey into the Caledonian north, after a wound has put him out of Army service, to see if any trace can be found of the mysteriously vanished Ninth Legion. Second-century Britain may not seem an enticing period; yet Miss Sutcliff writes so evocatively and we...