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Title: Great topic, awful technique
Review: I couldn't get 20 pages into it, and I am a HUGE medieval history buff. I actually left the coffee shop where I was reading it, walked back to the bookseller's from whence it came, and asked for a refund. The writing was so rife with errors of grammar and punctuation that it distracted me from the subject matter, and that's death for any book. How this Oxford-educated chap managed to become a best-selling historical author with all his run-on sentences and clumsy, repetitive word choices is a mystery. (How many time can you use the term, "not to mention" in a single page?) To be charitable, maybe he had really good editorial support for his earlier works; but the editor who allowed this mess to go to press without being vetted for correct grammar should be pilloried and pelted with hardbound copies of the Chicago Style Manual.
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