The Celts

The appearance of Nora Chadwick's book The Celts a quarter of a century ago was a milestone in Celtic Studies. It marked the culmination of a lifetime's study by one of our greatest Celtic scholars, a distillation of knowledge and wisdom presented with consummate ease to delight and inform fellow scholars and the general reader alike. It was then, and is still, a masterpiece and we are all indebted to its publishers for keeping the work in print. Nora Chadwick had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Celtic world but her particular interest lay in the later period when Celtic culture was restricted to the islands of Britain and Ireland and the peninsula of Brittany. For those of us approaching the Celts from the depths of prehistory this was the Celtic twilight, but in the hands of Nora Chadwick the twilight became an Indian summer - a period which saw a remarkable cultural flowering, with echoes reverberating deep from the past yet a distinct phenomenon with quality and energy of its own