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.