Keepers of the Keys of Heaven by Roger Collins.

This is more of a half- or failed-report, as I gave up 22% of the way through. It’s a history of the papacy, a topic that would be both challenging & promising for a historian, featuring as it does vast swathes of near-archival-oblivion, sundry tedious “waste of a pope” popes, but also marvellously hideous incidents and diabolical plots & poisonings.

Unfortunately, I found the book unengaging and at times outright badly-written. It is full of overly-long and overly-intricate sentences, e.g. “The peoples of the lands east of the Rhine in which the Anglo-Saxon missionaries worked had long been regarded by the Frankish kings as their subjects, even though this ceased to be a reality around 650.”

This was the sentence at which I decided to stop reading. It’s typical academic prose – gassy and bloated with clauses. The academic begins with an idea and then starts throwing more information in, like a man making a Negroni who decides to pour a bit of red wine in, why not, it’s a similar colour and has alcohol in it, eh?

It’s unclear if he means “Anglo-Saxon missionaries worked in all of the lands east of the Rhine” or “the Anglo-Saxon missionaries worked in some of the lands east of the Rhine”. From the syntax (I’ve forgotten the context, as I gave up on the book a couple of months ago, so I am working purely from the sentence construction) it sounds like “some of the lands” but I am unsure – it could be either.

In addition “this ceased to be a reality around 650”. What did? The work of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries? That’s the only thing which really makes sense to me, but to apply “this ceased to be a reality” here is awkward beyond belief. Yet what else could it mean? What else could have “ceased to be a reality”? That the people in these lands were perceived as subjects by the Frankish kings? But how can a perception cease to be a reality? It was always a perception, as distinct from reality, surely? Or does he mean that these peoples actually were subjects, and ceased to be so around 650, but the Frankish kings continued to perceive them as such?

This is typical of academic prose. Collins is undoubtedly far more learned (it’s pronounced /ˈlɜː(r)nɪd/) than me, and almost certainly far more intelligent, but he’s an academic and so cannot write English; and because I have to listen to mutilated English every day, I am disinclined to read it in my spare time.

The 22% I read was by no means bad, but there was no mastering vision to shape incidents & event, and perhaps for this reason the prose limps like a repeatedly sodomized tramp.