Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > O'Brian, Patrick - Byron Rogers (review date 10 July 1993)

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Byron Rogers (review date 10 July 1993)

SOURCE: “So Much They Talked, So Very Little Said,” in Spectator, Vol. 271, No. 8609, July 10, 1993, pp. 28–29.

[In the following positive review, Rogers explores the vast amount of historical detail included in The Wine-Dark Sea.]

The Wine-Dark Sea has to be the most extraordinary work I have read by a contemporary. It is the 16th in a series about the sea wars against Napoleon, a series so interlinked that to come for the first time on one of these books is like finding a solitary surviving fragment from a lost cycle of heroic saga.

I am reminded of those fragments written by Taliesin in the sixth century about the doomed Welsh kingdoms of Southern Scotland. In these, as here, characters appear trailing incidents and relationships you are expected to know about from earlier works. Such matters have kept Welsh scholars gainfully employed for decades, and I could have done with...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John Bayley (essay date 7 November 1991)
   2. Frank Stewart (review date 4 April 1993)
   3. Byron Rogers (review date 10 July 1993)
   4. Michael Dirda (review date August 1993)
   5. Patrick T. Reardon (review date 19 December 1993)
   6. Frederick Pratter (review date 31 December 1993)
   7. John Balzar (review date 2 January 1994)
   8. Thomas McGonigle (review date 2 January 1994)
   9. Elliott Abrams (review date 24 January 1994)
   10. James Hamilton-Paterson (review date 26 December 1994)
   11. Frederick Pratter (review date 2 May 1995)
   12. Katherine A. Powers (review date July 1995)
   13. Sam Pickering (review date Spring 1996)
   14. Thomas R. Edwards (essay date Summer 1996)
   15. John Balzar (review date 20 October 1996)
   16. Edward T. Wheeler (review date 8 November 1996)
   17. Christopher Clausen (review date 16 December 1996)
   18. James Teacher (review date 4 January 1997)
   19. John Mullan (review date 10 January 1997)
   20. Books Magazine (review date October 1997)
   21. Molly Finn (essay date 19 June 1998)
   22. Alan Judd (review date 22 August 1998)
   23. Barbara Everett (review date 4 September 1998)
   24. Martin Jacques (review date 6 September 1998)
   25. Christopher Hitchens (essay date 9 March 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright