The legends discussed in these books concern Robin Hood, the early history of Glastonbury, and the meaning of the megaliths. Of the ‘facts’ of early English history which Every Schoolboy Knows – Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Waves, Harold and the Arrow – only the last has any claim to be in a real sense true (and even that has only recently been rescued from understandable scepticism by painstaking scholarship). If one English reaction to his observation is likely to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced. It has been said of the early Christian Irish that they were very interested in their history, but preferred it in the form of fiction.
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