Books: Back to the Druids

THE DARK ISLAND (312 pp.)—Henry Treece—Random House ($3).

As if to muffle the din of the Thermo-Nuclear Age, some British authors in the last 16 months have pulled the blanket of history over their heads and burrowed in the warm, dark bed of the past. H.F.M. Prescott's The Man on a Donkey was a skillfully done period piece about England under Henry VIII. In The Golden Hand, Edith Simon told a leisurely tale about an English cathedral town and the faith that sustained it (14th century). In The Little Emperors, Alfred Duggan made diverting entertainment out of the fall of the Roman...