Giveaway: 1000th Post Giveaway

Today I have reached a significant milestone on my blog... my 1000th post!

Who knew when I set up my blog in October 2011 that I would still be doing it almost 3 years later and that I would have had in excess of 170,000 page views... I didn't think anyone other than family and friends would read it!

So I would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who has helped me to achieve this milestone, the publishers who have sent me amazing books to review, authors who have agreed to be interviewed or written guest features, guest reviewers who have helped me review so many fab books but most of all everyone who has taken the time to read the posts I've uploaded.

Guest Post: Robert Bruce: Man vs Myth by Robyn Young

Today I have something a little different for you, a fascinating guest piece by historical fiction author Robyn Young about Robert Bruce who her Insurrection trilogy revolves around. 

For all his power on the stage of history; for the prominent role he played and his impact on a nation – a nation that, this month at Bannockburn, will celebrate one of his greatest victories seven hundred years on – Robert Bruce remains an enigma.

There are many gaps in our knowledge of him, long periods of silence in the records, which are also littered with contradictions and discrepancies. We still don’t, for certain, where he was born. Writtle in Essex, where his family owned lands, has claimed him as their son, as has Turnberry in Scotland. It is an appropriate split given Robert’s early career during the Wars of Independence, shifting his allegiance back and forth between Scotland and England, fighting at various moments alongside both William Wallace and Edward I. His early life is virtually unknown and can only be glimpsed by looking through the murky windows of what we know about the childhoods of the nobility during this era. We don’t know what his relationships with his family were like – his mother and father, his four brothers and five sisters, his powerful grandfather, who competed for the throne in the wake of the death of King Alexander III. We can only read between the lines to get the merest sense of what they might have been like – the potential fractures, the possible connections.