2 Feb '12

“This episode was about the fizzling out of the Crusades, one of the more ignoble European enterprises of the last millenium. But if you’d assumed that it would be dull on account of that, you’d have been wrong.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Perhaps the most surprising of all in this intelligent, lively, detail-stuffed account was how small a role religion played in the key events.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“Asbridge’s series kept talking heads to a minimum, banned dramatic reconstructions, was unafraid to go into libraries to examine key eyewitness accounts  and, whenever we were about to get lost, showed us a map.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Via such bleak yet vivid anecdotage did the film manage to paint a detailed, compelling and sympathetic portrait of a town ground down by poverty and a populace clearly drinking to forget.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The film began well with horror stories of proles that the bouncers, gentle souls, affected to find disturbing, and which middle-class viewers will have enjoyed voyeuristically.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“A programme less suited to a post-prandial sofa slump it is hard to imagine, unless your definition of vegging out allows for phrases such as “malodorous Canutism” (a description of the French anti-globalist José Bové, who sometimes makes his points with cowshit). But, like its predecessors, it really repays the effort.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It is distinctly different and distinctly thrilling to be addressed by someone who isn’t afraid of words, abstract thought or of yoking the two together and setting himself up as the last working homme serieux in the west.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian