An Officer and A Spy<\/em><\/strong> (Arrow Books, 2014), which is based on the true story of the Dreyfus Affair. The novel begins with the conviction of a French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for spying and follows the gradual realization by military intelligence officer, Georges Picquart, that Dreyfus has been wrongfully convicted. Currently I’m about a third of the way through and am finding it really engaging reading. The book combines a deft portrayal of the historical period, including the anti-Semitism that drove Dreyfus’s conviction, together with a real spy thriller that is at least as riveting as anything Hollywood could devise — without the need for CGI or other special effects.<\/p>\nWhether Anglo-Saxon England, the conflict with the Danes, and the life of Alfred the Great are your thing, or a real historical whodunnit and the miscarriage of justice meted out to Alfred Dreyfus is more your style, I think either Douglas Woodruff’s The Life and Times of Alfred the Great <\/em><\/strong>or Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong> will well repay your time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Next to speculative fiction, the literary “genre” I like best is historical, although in my case I include both fiction and non fiction under that umbrella. So at the moment I’m reading — and enjoying — Douglas Woodruff’s The Life and Times of Alfred the Great (Weidenfled & Nicolson, 1974) which is a non-fiction account […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-im-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26608"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26614,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26608\/revisions\/26614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Alfred_Life_and_Times\"](\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Alfred_Life_and_Times.jpg\")
<\/a>So at the moment I’m reading — and enjoying — Douglas Woodruff’s The Life and Times of Alfred the Great<\/em><\/strong> (Weidenfled & Nicolson, 1974) which is a non-fiction account of the life and times of the Anglo-Saxon monarch. This is very much a coffee table book, so the writing is accessible and accompanied by many beautiful plates of manuscripts, craft, art, and weapons of the period. I am enjoying it very much but would describe it as an entry level work for looking at the period rather than heavy-duty history.<\/p>\n