You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest this week is Miranda

Carter, whose books include Anthony Blunt, his lives, and the three emperors on King George

V, Kaiser-Helhelm II, and Sir Nicholas II. She has a piece in the current issue of the

LRP on the historical novelist, Mary Reynolds. It's a review of a new Everyman edition of

Reynolds' two Theseus novels, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, which were first published

in 1958 and 1962.

Hello, Miranda, and thank you very much for joining me.

It's a pleasure.

So I've just described Mary Reynolds as a historical novelist.

Is that right, do you think, or in the case of these theseus novels, at least, would

something like mythical novelist be more accurate?

I suppose those two, yes, you know, they are recreations of a myth, but they are of the eight

novels she wrote set in classical Greece.

They are the two that are sort of, I suppose, technically not exactly historical.

Although the way that she conceives of

Theseus, this mythological figure, is as if he is a historical figure. I think at the point at

which she was writing, there were theories that perhaps the Theseus myth referred to a real

Bronze Age king.

And so she sort of set about trying to kind of reconstruct his life through looking at archaeology,

you know, theories of Bronze Age movements, ideas about belief systems, that sort of thing,

as if he was a historical character.

And it works incredibly well, I think.

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