P.B. Ellis does a reasonably good job of summarizing the scholarship on the Cromwellian era in Irish History. His presentation of events provides enough details for the reader to appreciate the complexities of Anglo-Irish politics during this time. And yet, the reader doesn't have to already be an expert in the field to understand the big picture.

Peter Beresford Ellis cheerfully admits to a degree of hyperbole in the title of this excellent survey of Celtic history. There was no "Celtic Empire" as such, and no centralized Celtic authority, but this people, the aboriginal tribe of Europe, occupied the continent from its fringes in Iberia and Ireland all the way to central Anatolia. As such, they formed the foundation stock of the modern Irish, Welsh, Scottish, English, Bretons, French, Swiss, Austrians, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as contributing their bloodlines to the Italians, Balkan peoples, Turks, and even Germans and Slavs.

The Celts had an overwhelming cultural impact on the formation of modern Europe, but it is an impact which is shrouded, due to the Roman domination of the Celts around the time of Christ. Most European rivers have Celtic names (the Danube, the Don, the Dnieper, and the Donets are all named for the Celtic river-goddess Danu; and the Rhine and the Rhone both are named from the Celtic word for "valley").

Unfortunately, the Celts abjured writing in favor of human memory, so that, as their cultural nexus dispersed so did their learning and lore. Hence, we know relatively little about these people, the ancestors of many of us of European background. What we do know is often distorted, or plain wrong, written by Greeks and Romans, the latter (particularly Caesar, in his "Gallic Wars"), setting out to deride the barbarians seen as only fit for conquest.

Ellis tries mightily to lift the veil in this book. He has a fine appreciation for his subject, and if he makes the error of sometimes casting his Celts as "noble savages," replete with democratic thoughts and ways, he can be forgiven for doubting the Roman histories.

Given the relative lack of written primary source material, and the enigmatic messages of archaeological ruins, the book is necessarily too short, and reads as the quickest thousand-year history in print. It's still an excellent effort to bring these people, so long in the darkness, back into the light.

This book was excellent and the author is really an expert in his field. I was recently drawn to Celtic spirituality. I read this book slowly to completely understand it, and it was worth every minute! It is very academic and filled with historical information.

- had they been inseparable, they would have been insuperable.

Thus are paraphrased Tacticus's thoughts on that great ancient tribe, the Celts, to whom so much of Western Civilization is owed yet so little acknowledged. As Ellis tells us, many of the famous Roman writers and historians were profoundly influenced by Celtic literature - if not Celtic themselves. Celts served as mercenaries in the armies of Rome, Asia Minor, Greece and Egypt; they populated Europe from Bulgaria to Spain; they treated with Alexander and, on numerous occasions, and oh-so-narrowly missed the opportunity to beat Caesar. Ellis introduces us to the basic elements of Celtic society, a very democratic model that was largely shattered by the Roman conquest, and then takes us to those enclaves, such as Ireland and non-Roman Britain, where the culture continued to flourish. An extremely well-written history; a useful counterweight to Roman history, which too often neglects the Celtic achievement.

Celtic spirituality seems to be a buzz word among Christians and pagans alike, and efforts to define it abound. I recommend this book to readers who are more willing to be challenged rather than soothed by things Celtic. P.B. Ellis states his mission as "an introductory argument about the reality and the legend of the Druids" (p 21). He succeeds quite well in this mission, distilling what can be known from primary sources with very thorough research. Ellis also asks the questions that we would dearly like to ask of these mysterious people, who unfortunately seem to have had a prohibition against committing their scholarship to writing, leaving historians to piece together their philosophy and practices from the works of other observers. Ellis does an exceptional job of revealing the probable biases of these secondary sources, although his style of argument becomes somewhat convoluted at times.

Ellis pulls no punches in criticizing the scholarly positions of other writers on the subject -- an approach which can seem abrasive or refreshing, depending on one's taste. His obvious disdain for the New Age, soft-focus and romaniticized view of Druids may seem harsh as well. But his genuine love for and fascination with Celtic peoples perhaps justifies the contempt he displays for those who call themselves "New Age Celts...preaching harmony with nature, who have stared in incomprehension when it has been pointed out to them that the Celtic civilization itself is struggling in a last ditch attempt to survive" (p 280). Ellis concludes his work by pointing out the "uncomfortable reality for those who would conjure Druids and ancient Celts to their new concepts of 'spiritual enlightenment'" while ignoring the fact that Celtic languages and cultures are in decline in our increasingly homogenized modern world.

Above and beyond the obvious short-comings of the human ego as well as humanitie's collective will to amnesia especially in terms of the actual histories of the conquered, Mr Ellis's book while, well researched and superbly written takes the initiate student of Celtic studies to the next level with his work "The Druids". While roughly outlining the history and many cultural contributions of the Celts, Ellis dives into the matter of the caste or intelligentsia of the above group with an objectivity I, as of yet have not come across in most of that which passes itself off as scholarly and autoritative historical research in this area. In this work, Ellis cleaves this group from the theatrical-gothic misrespresentations that have colored popular opinion concerning them and has rightfully repaired and restored to them a more realistic and humane image. What many seem to either have forgotten or, more aptly (and ignorantly) choose to disregard is the fact that the Celts were the first wave of Indo-Europeans to enter into Western Europe and as such were to also be the first to incorporate the various customs of those they replaced and/or supplanted. Now there is still an enormous amount that is not known concerning those who came from the steppes during the great migrations from that mystcal homeland of the I.E. peoples though much more has miraculously survived as they came to be organized in what we now call Civilization. Ellis rightfully points to the caste and it's system functions throughout the Celtic areas of influence (read:not-empire) and faithfully alludes to the society in which they operated while taking into consideration the reports of such classical experts as Posidenus, Strabo, Ceasar(et.al.) as well as their obvious negative biases towards these people and their society which by virtue of its structure and philosophy left that of the experts above choking in the dust. What one needs to remember when dealing with the Celts is that while they were agrarian, with a defined caste structure (roughly equivalent to that of post-Aryan India) the culture was interestingly enough, devoid of such stifling aspects as primogeniture as well as the extremely poor position of women, children, the aged, property rights and community welfare which have been downplayed or ignored or commodified with the likes civilization founded on Greek and Roman models and their descendents. And as such, Ellis heroically takes the rather skewed and dehumanized view that has been proffered and correctly gives weight to the actual functions of the subcastes (of druids) and incorporates them into the greater societal umwelt smashing the myths that have have been put down in order to keep the descendents of these people in the same place, Ellis writes an enlightening and autoritative book that will make the soul of any Celtophile light. He eschews the path that others have taken especially in the New-Age community by weilding facts against the nebulous darkness of ignorance and to a degree, intolerance that surrounds any group that has a bona-fide original opinion of life or the universe not in line with a Civilized or Mono-lithic control scheme or its hokey, Spun-down or denatured pseudo-equivalents. This book does justice to these people and in particular the Druids by destroying the blood thirsty image with finely researched, bias-corrected descriptions of a caste who, in a modern modern sense would have serve the same functions today as doctors,lawyers,astronomers, psychologists,poets, musicians and philosophers. Incidentally my opinion is that their standards probably could not be eclipsed even now. To get an idea of the mindset that can perpetuate the poor image these people have recieved we only have to look back to Columbus' early reports on the Arawak people, what happened next is already history. Also keep in mind, that on the opening day of the Colliseum, upwards of 15,000 people and about 5,000 animals were slaughtered in front of a packed house of 80,000. Yes, and this was just opening day in the Civilized city of Rome. As any student of life, history or polit-science knows we tend to dehumanize our enemies in order to justify any or all methods necessary to separate them from their identity as well other material items. This is done by the extirpation of their culture as well as those responsible for maintaining it. This book is a must have for anyone interested in the Celts, their intelligentsia as well as the insight Mr. Beresford gives the reader as to the mindset of a much freer as well as maligned culture that now unfortunately exists only in the hearts and sad smiles of the hidden. If nothing else, throw an eye at this book, it will lighten the hearts of those who contemplate "the truth angainst the world" and if nothing else gives all of us, as students of life a peek into a world that now is on the ropes of existence. Read, enjoy and understand.

Peter Berresford Ellis is a popular historian, not an academic historian. The primary difference between popular and academic historians is that they write for different audiences. Ellis' work has been criticized for lacking the kind of detailed references that a peer-reviewed book or article would include. The reader must guess where the citations and allusions may be researched and accept the citations and translations as accurate.

Hence, you're not likely to find many historians recommending an Ellis book to their students. But students who have read Ellis will have a very clear idea of what materials to look for. And he does a very good job of challenging long-standing interpretations which have always been flimsy or weak at best. Unfortunately for him, the science of historical analysis requires accountability and Ellis refuses to be accountable. He takes his case to the popular audience and hopes to influence the broader imagination.

That's all well and good, but some of his research has been challenged and Ellis has had to make at least one major retraction in his career. He is a Celto-centric writer and people of Celtic heritage should be glad to know there is still a dedicated flag-waver around. But in the end, no matter how well he writes, no matter how thorough his research, Ellis must be regarded only as a popular historian. In that respect, he is one of the finest popular historians I've had the pleasure to read.

The original Book of Deer described as "one of the principal antiquities of Scotland" is a ninth century Celtic/Pictish Gospel illuminated manuscript, preserved in the Library of Cambridge University UK. It was copied and illustrated by unknown monks in the Celtic monastery of Deer near Aberdeen. The illustrations have a childlike quality, and such colour as remains is washes mainly now in pastel colours. Strangely for what was intended to be an important ceremonial book there are obvious errors in the Knotwork borders. The text is in rather bad Latin with later Scottish Gaelic additions. It differs markedly from the later Book of Kells which still has sophisticated, extremely detailed initials, illustrations, and title pages still in vibrant colour. It also differs clearly from its intricate and elaborate Pagan predecessors such as the Gundestrup Cauldron.

This book has three photographic plates, the front cover plate and its reverse, mirror imaged, showing the poor preservation and obvious fading of the original. It also has modern line drawn accurate representations of all the drawings, illustrations, and initials, by Roy Ellsworth, from it namesake. These contain much more detail than the equivalent photographic plates due to fading of the original from the original probably black inks to dark and sometimes light brown. These modern illustrations show the colour washes as crosshatched shading. They show almost lost details, hopefully, in the same line strength as the original had in the ninth century.

The illustrations from the Book of Kells appear reproduced in numerous places from one of my T Shirts, to embroidery, WWW sites and numerous other places. This would be impossible from either the photographs or the accurate line drawings. This book therefore also contains simplified, and slightly corrected, drawings of the illustrations to demonstrate construction methods. "To allow an exploration of one's own colour arrangements".

The colourful history of the book from a description of the foundation of the monastery at Deer, to its rediscovery in the library of Cambridge University, including its association with the historical Scottish King MacBeth, is by the noted Celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis. He also gives detailed descriptions of all the illustrations comparing them with both earlier, and later Celtic treasures. He is of the opinion that the rather strange depiction of legs and feet, of the apostles might be an echo of the squatting position in which Celtic Gods are often portrayed.

The Book of Deer is one of the most neglected Scottish historical resources...It is an important piece of evidence in the search for Lowland Gaelic... so too is it the earliest known Scottish Gaelic. It appears to have been written in response to the Norman plantations of the period, since although Gaelic had been written down in Ireland from an early stage most of the land contracts were oral, unlike the Anglo-Normans who wished to colonise the Scottish lowlands. Thus it is a good counterweight against much of the later historical revisionism in Scotland- most people in North East Scotland are unaware of the book or the fact Gaidhlig had been spoken in the Lowlands.

The text of this book alone is worth five stars, but I'm afraid the pictures are not very interesting, which is why I've taken a star off. By the way I believe PBE is co-author, not sole author of this work. This work has gone some of the way towards making this book better known.

This book was so extremely bias against the Romans that one could easily conclude that the author lost his most beloved ones in a battle against the Romans!! Even his phraseology throughout the book betrays what seems to be a personal hatred of this ancient race. I found his contemptuous remarks to be distracting to the ease of reading. That aside, the author struggles in this book to portray the Celts as a culture much more advanced than was perceived by the first hand accounts of ancient Greek and Roman writers and historians. In doing so he resorts to some fairly weak leaps of logic. His primary view seems to be that to arrive at historical accuracy all one needs to do is to reverse whatever the Roman accounts were in each and every case.

The arguments in this book for Celtic superiority over the Romans is so tainted that in some cases I actually laughed out loud. Reading this book one would think that the armies of Rome won most of their battles by dumb luck. Which is not bad considering that Rome's greatly outnumbered armies eventually conquered almost all of the Celtic lands and added Britian to the Empire, holding it for over 400 years!

If you're interested in names and dates this book is fine. But if you're interested in what the ancient Celts and the Italic/Roman people were actually like, and how the cultures interacted, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Peter Berresford Ellis has done, I think, an excellent job portraying a culture whose accomplishments are far too easily dismissed in favour of other well documented ancient cultures. To present his representation of a culture that traditionally recorded historical events orally, Ellis has had to make some insightful points using the material at hand and has made good work of presenting it in a fashion enjoyable to read.

Peter Beresford Ellis's book gives the initial impression of a scholarly and thorough treatment of his subject, but its unpleasant political undertones eventually become clear.

He claims that the Anglo-Saxons waged a war of extermination against the people of Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire. He attributes a unity and aggressive purpose to a haphazard series of Germanic migrations, that is simply not borne out by the evidence presented. Indeed, his accusations against the English people border on racism. He misses the point that the British imperial drive has its roots in Norman, not Saxon history; the record of the Normans in the Mediterranean and the Holy Land are evidence enough of this. It is a shame that such a potentially important book should be ruined by predjudice.

A gritty, covincing history lesson on what really went down all those years ago. A scene setting eye opener that lays it all out in place and time. von Eschenbach, de Troyes, Charlotte Guest, Monmouth et al wrote some ripping yarns, but Peter Berresford Ellis is the bloke for me - now all it's going to take is finding a long lost replacement for a piece that's now out of of print

Like many of P.B. Ellis' books, this volume is not as accurate as it seems. The linguistic information, in particular, is unreliable. For a few more dollars, you can have the much more reliable and more comprehensive _Dictionary of Celtic Mythology_ edited by James Mac Killop. It's worth the extra investment, no matter how strict your budget.

This is a very useful reference book for anyone studying Celtic mythology. It is comprehensive and its readability is enhanced by the clear and uncluttered design. Entries vary from names ("Manannan Mac Lir") to topics ("Ard Ri"), and provide succinct yet clear descriptions and histories. However, it is clear that choices have been made where space was limited or excessive material would detract from the readability. This is most notable in cases where the book says, "There are no fewer than seven persons of this name in Celtic mythology. However, the most notable is ...". Yet despite this minor shortcoming, this is one of the books I reach for first when I need to look up the details of some obscure Irish hero or monster.

All in all, this is an excellent book for getting a basic idea before embarking on a more detailed investigation.

Originally published by WH Allen in 1981, as By Jove, Biggles !, a new semi-revised version was brought out for the Johns centenary in 1993. This hardback edition from Veloce has 314 pages and stitched binding. There is an index and a bibliography. Probably unintentionally following the lead of Johns (who also wrote under pseudonyms: William Earle, Jon Early, Flight Lieutenant, and perhaps "Vigilant"), it seems his two biographers are also prone to multiple identities/genders, writing variously as: Peter Ellis = Peter Tremayne = Peter MacAlan & as Piers Williams = Jenny Schofield.

The book is both a biography of Johns' and an analysis/rear-guard defence of some aspects of Johns' fiction. Much of the primary source material for the biography is drawn from Johns' own published autobiographical anecdotes circa the 1930s - 1960s. The book is liberally laced with excerpts from Johns' editorials, interviews and commentaries, conveniently mustered here all in the one volume. Other material is drawn from relatives of Johns and independent sources. Unfortunately the various informants are sometimes in disagreement. Intermittently the dividing line between the biographical fact and the fiction in Johns' own memoirs becomes indistinguishable. The biographers include both versions of an actual incident in which Johns & TE Lawrence met, but thereupon later each wrote highly contradictory accounts. This underlines the danger in accepting too readily an author's own autobiographical accounts, when these are reworked for posterity and public consumption 15 to 20 years after the original events. (I do not believe the nun episode, pull the other leg please.)

While I have no knowledge of the co-authors' working routine when producing this work, I am left with a distinct impression that the contradictions evident in some of their views expressed at different places in the book could be explained by the co-authors not quite having both their clocks synchronised. This again somewhat echoes Johns' own idiosyncracies, whereby some of the Semitic stereotypes appearing in Johns' work in the mid-1930s either disappeared in the face of the holocaust, never to re-surface after 1939; or, in the case of racial slurs which continued to appear until the mid 1950s were finally rectified in sanitised reprints published after Johns' death. The original text of Biggles in Australia is never mentioned in this context, although Biggles and the Black Raider is examined. It remains unclear to what extent Johns (& Biggles) led, or trailed, or merely reflected attitudes within the English intelligentsia current at any particular point in time. The biographers have nothing to say in regards to Johns' (Biggles') persistent bigoted vilifications of all things Japanese. Somebody should have told Johns (1) English does not have an indigenous script, Japanese uses three distinct scripts, two of which are indigenous (2) cultured pearls are indistinguishable from natural pearls (3) Japanese saw technology surpasses European saw technology (at a time when Europeans were still living in thatched huts).

The biographers allow a few factual mistakes to creep into their text, more through carelessness than ignorance. Still I don't think it commendable that these should be apparent even to a mere fan, while at the same time getting past both the authors and their proof-reader/s. Among the illustrations facing p161 is a photograph of the book "Biggles" of the Camel Squadron, with the dustjacket depicting German biplanes under attack by Sopwith Camels. I find it bizarre, although telling, that the authors should allow an illustration in which a swastika has been painted on the fuselage of a 1918 German warplane to make it into the final publication.

The organisation of this edition varies from the original printing, with some of the material relating to the 1970s and 1980s controversy over political correctness in Johns' work being relegated from the front of the first edition to the back of the second edition. It is to be regretted that the co-authors did not see fit to go to the trouble to re-write the treatment of Mossyface and other earley (!) works in the original text of the book, instead leaving the subsequently discredited discussion from the first edition unchanged for the second edition. Ironically, in the second edition it is only after one reads the Afterword at the end of the book that one learns what one read in the middle of the book was inaccurate.

In assessing this book it would be helpful to know who sponsored its production.

The book would be appreciated by anyone with an interest in Johns, Biggles, Worrals & Co. But for a scholarly analysis of Biggles et alia as a cultural phenomenon mirroring British mores of the mid 20th century I think we must hope some other writer (or PhD English literature or sociology student) takes up the challenge. I look forward to theses on (a) the theme of cross-dressing in Biggles, Worrals and Steeley, (b) morbidity, mortality and the epidemiology of lung cancer and emphysema among Biggles readers, (c) cinema archetypes and the characters in the books of Johns, & (d) a ghost writing whodunnit - the problem with "Biggles Works it Out".

I'm no expert in this period of history, I have an understanding of the cultures and countries involved and as such I enjoyed this book very much. I have read an earlier book by this author 'The Celtic Empire' which I thought was a well written and presented account of the Celtic people. This led me to purchase this book and I will more than likely buy his latest account of the Celts titled 'Celt & Roman'.

In this book the author covers the Celts during the period of the time when Greece and Rome were the dominate players in the ancient world. Its an enjoyable read and I learnt a few things on the journey. The book covers their social background and inter-action with other people along with their military campaigns against the Greeks and Romans and their occassional mercenary role in the ancient armies. The author does not go into excessive detail but certainly provides the facts as he knows them and tells a good story in the process.