In his 1999 Introduction to the first reprint of this novel from 1955 - a year of the Cold War that began with the Baghdad Pact and ended with the official start of the Vietnam War - Raymond H. Thompson described Naomi Mitchison's contribution to the Arthurian tradition as 'not only a comic masterpiece, but a guidebook into spiritual growth'. She achieves this by drawing on her own experience as a journalist to explore the fantastic events surrounding...