The Once and Future King

“White is less famous than Lewis and Tolkien, but he was a better writer, at least as far as style goes, and his book is a true masterpiece in its own right – a thoroughly modern re-imagining of the great English epic, the story of King Arthur. Like Tolkien, White takes an ancient, mythic landscape and scales it down to human size (or perhaps he scales us up). But White’s world is more brightly lit than Tolkien’s – he dispenses with all those Wagnerian storm clouds. White’s England is all streaming banners and sun-splashed meadows and shining walls, and he lingers longer over his characters, making them more complex and flawed and divided against themselves. “ Read more...

The best books on Fantasy

Lev Grossman, Novelist

“T H White wrote this in the 50s when a lot of people were writing fantasy epics, like Tolkien and C S Lewis, Mervyn Peake and all these British writers who were writing masterpieces after the war. But I think what the books all did was to take the myths of the Nordic and Celtic peoples and make them available to a traumatised post-war populus and reintroduced romanticism in a context that people who’d fought in those wars could understand. This is the King Arthur story and I guess it’s about compassion. He doesn’t want to be king, he becomes king, his best friend and his wife fall in love and he is compassionate and understanding about that and he’s always trying to put the bigger picture first. “ Read more...

The best books on The Miracle of Autism

Rupert Isaacson, Novelist