SOURCE: “So Much They Talked, So Very Little Said,” in Spectator, Vol. 271, No. 8609, July 10, 1993, pp. 28–29.

In the following positive review, Rogers explores the vast amount of historical detail included in The Wine-Dark Sea.

The Wine-Dark Sea has to be the most extraordinary work I have read by a contemporary. It is the 16th in a series about the sea wars against Napoleon, a series so interlinked that to come for the first time on one of these books is like finding a solitary surviving fragment from a lost cycle of heroic saga.

I am reminded of those fragments written by Taliesin in the sixth century about the doomed Welsh kingdoms of Southern Scotland. In these, as here, characters appear trailing incidents and relationships you are expected to know about from earlier works. Such matters have kept Welsh scholars gainfully employed for decades, and I could have done with...