Some English History

Rereading Poul Anderson's works has slowed down because I have:

worked my way through most of the Technic History;

been reading Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise for the first time;

begun rereading Bryan Talbot's Alice In Sunderland.

Since I have met Bryan Talbot a few times and saw Poul Anderson at a couple of World SF Cons, that leaves Peter O'Donnell as the only one of these three writers with whom I have had no personal or visual contact.

Talbot's Alice... summarizes a lot of English history and thus covers some familiar Andersonian territory. Talbot mentions Romans, Vikings and Normans but, so far, has skipped over Harald Hardrada. He reminds us that it was the Venerable Bede, the father of English history, who invented the BC/AD calendar. 

Does anyone out there know which Poul Anderson book this cover illustration is for?

Other Reading

Occasionally, I mention other current reading in order to locate Poul Anderson in a wider literary and fictive context. Page viewers may reflect on their own other reading, although sometimes we will overlap.

I read Steig Larsson's trilogy, then a book about the trilogy which made a comparison with Modesty Blaise, a character of whom I had heard but never read. Googling Modesty reveals that Peter O'Donnell wrote:

a Modesty Blaise comic strip;
a screenplay based on the comic strip;
a novel based on the screen play;
ten further novels;
two short story collections, basing some stories on comic strips and vice versa.

The unsuccessful 1966 film, rewritten by others and released after O'Donnell's more successful novelization of his original screenplay, was promoted as a female James Bond, although clearly Modesty Blaise has a life of her own, with a fascinating interplay between three media, the prose fiction coming not first but last.