[In The Last of the Wine] Miss Renault gives us both sides of the coin, the very special and precious relationship that could exist between men who were lovers, and the pathetic lot of Athenian women of good family, who could aspire to nothing higher in life than playing the role of housekeeper and brood mare.

Writers too often have looked at this dazzling age through rose-colored glasses. Miss Renault sees the shadows as well as the highlights…. [She shows us] the people who once prided themselves on their heroic resistance to tyranny dumbly submitting to the viciousness of a committee of tyrants handpicked by victorious Sparta. The tragic story was first told by Greece's great historian, Thucydides, with clinical dispassion; Miss Renault retells it as living human experience. The Last of the Wine is her masterpiece. None of the novels that followed quite comes up to the mark it set.

Her next book [The King Must Die] departed from history for the filmy stuff of legend….

In The King Must Die Miss Renault retells the legend in the form of Theseus's autobiography…. It is a riproaring tale à la H. Rider Haggard, but with one significant difference: all Miss Renault's fertile inventions are ingeniously derived either from elements in the legend or from material unearthed by the archeologists' spades.

The Bull from the Sea takes up where The King Must Die left off. It relates the rest of the hero's story…. The novel, slower paced and more somber than its predecessor, reflects the darker mood of the legends of Theseus's later life.

Having completed the transformation of the Theseus myth into fiction, Miss Renault returned to the terra firma of history. One of ancient Athens's great contributions to Western culture was the theater. For protagonist of The Mask of Apollo she invented a fictional tragic actor named Nikeratos, a Laurence Olivier or Paul Scofield, as it were, of the fourth century B.C. (p. 28)

And now, in Fire from Heaven, her latest work, Miss Renault turns to what was happening during these same years at the other end of the Greek world, the country to the north called Macedon….

Miss Renault describes Alexander's formative years with the subtle skill and understanding that are the hallmark of her best work. (p. 61)

All ages have felt the irresistible appeal of this mortal who was somehow touched by heaven's fire. His beauty, straightforwardness, sense of honor, soaring ambition, and other rare and precious qualities made him a godlike figure to the ancients—an actual god to some—while later idolaters cast him in the role of romantic hero. Miss Renault portrays the whole man—not only the charismatic leader but the canny politician; not only the cultured intellectual but the genius at bureaucratic organization….

Above all, she never lets us forget that he was first and foremost a soldier, that he climbed the heights of history on a ladder of gore….

Fire from Heaven is one of the best [of Miss Renault's novels based on ancient Greece], a close runner-up to the author's masterly Last of the Wine. (p. 62)