Of all the descriptions, however, my personal favourite is one relating to the heroine, Virginia: ‘She stole quietly downstairs and undid the bolts of the side door. Just a moment she paused, then, with a little gallant toss of the head, the same toss of the head with which her ancestors had gone into action in the crusades, she passed through.’

Not a sentence one could write without challenge today though it is not one without relevance to the nation-building mythology of Bulgaria in the present either.