Sublime

Unlike Gildas, he was not classically educated – his Latin was, by his own testimony, uncultured. The backdrop to his life is a landscape in which arbitrary violence, extreme wealth and poverty, kindness and cruelty are shadowed by a functioning, literate institutional church capable of conducting business with daughter churches across the Irish Se

His daughter Eanflæd was brought up, also in exile, as a Christian in the courts of Kent and then of Dagobert I in Paris.35 Her experience of sophisticated Frankish politics was to play a key role in the development of the Northumbrian state.

He was silent for an agent’s lifetime.

Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallic diplomat, poet and inveterate correspondent in the mid-to-late fifth century, wrote to his friend, a naval commander called Admiral Namatius: I whiled away some time talking with [the courier] about you; and he was very positive that you had weighed anchor, and in fulfilment of those half military, half naval duties o

In a secret drawer of his desk, making it difficult to open or close, lay docketed reports headed Villiers, Diana, widow of Charles Villiers, late of Bombay, Esquire, and Canning, Richard, of Park Street and Coluber House, co. Bristol. These two were as carefully documented as any pair of State suspects working for Bonaparte’s intelligence services