The darkness and the dawn

Thomas Costain tells a good story, but his writing frequently made me cringe:

“It was hard to believe that anything resembling the unmannerly sound generally described as a snort could issue from a nose as delicately made as Ildico's. But her response to his remark fell most certainly into some such category.”

Ugh. So hardly Robert Graves, then. But I enjoyed it enough to negotiate my way through the clunkers and persist to the end, and I did learn quite a bit about Attila and his career.