Hello Bernard, I dropped you a line a few months ago about R.L.S’s The Black Arrow. I just wanted to drop a line again and say that The Last Kingdom series is off to a great start ! The subject of Alfred The Great seems very unique; I was previously aware of him only as a dimly understood, semi-mythical figure that somehow got lumped into the Arthurian Cycle and thus lost his indentity. I was primarily a fan of your Sharpe series, but when the dismal King Arthur film was released a few months back, it spurred me to finally read your highly acclaimed Warlord books- needless to say I was not disappointed. While reading The Last Kingdom I decided to go back to Asser’s Life of King Alfred to compare them- this leads me to wonder, from a writer’s point of view, how do you slough away all the dusty, archaic, meandering writing styles of these ancient chroniclers to devise a way to tell the story from the pov of an actual character? How do you find a way into the story? Or rather, how do you develop a story with real people around something that seems, at times, about as dry as a census report? I first wondered what your process for this was while reading the Warlord books and thinking that your biggest accomplishment was wading thru all the works written about Arthur; without succumbing to what these works actually would have you believe about him. All of them seem to be skewered to fit ancient political views or imbued with unnecessary, fairy-tale wistfullness. It seems like a very imposing mindfield for a writer to tread thru. Also, I read Face of Battle recently based on your recommendation, since the book is divided into three major battles- Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme- I was left wondering if you would ever write a book about The Somme since the you seem to have depicted Agincourt and Waterloo so definitely? Thank you again for your time and all the wonderful books you have written! R.Kulb