It began, remembers Rachel Knowland, with a Viking raid. Her husband, the sacked Eton English master Will Knowland, had recommended the classic Norse saga 'The Long Ships' to students at the school's Huxley Book Club. He thought its buccaneering young hero Orm Tostesson might fire their teenage imaginations and they'd learn some history, geography and anthropology along the way.
But Knowland was rapped over the knuckles when a colleague complained, not about the book itself, but about the The New Statesman magazine review he'd added to pique their interest. 'A banquet of adventure by sea and land, with man-size helpings of battle and murder, robbery and rape,' it enthused.