I’ve just finished reading Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment). I’m not a great one for Arthurian fiction but these three books – written in the 1970s – are excellent.  I think I liked them because they shied away from the great Arthurian battlegrounds, focusing instead purely on Merlin’s life, dark age politics, and beautiful but dangerous women.  They were also set in the Dark Ages, eschewing the romantic nonsense of Mallory and De Troyes.  Other authors have done this since but Stewart does this so completely and convincingly that you really do feel the cultural richness of Britain in its post-Roman, pre-Saxon days.  I seem to remember too a (frankly dreadful) BBC adaptation of The Crystal Cave back in the early 1990s which didn’t do justice to the book.  This is a pity as they’d make a great trilogy of films.  However the Beeb currently have a dull and perfunctory version of Merlin on the books at the moment so it’s unlikely they’d do it again.