May I please ask if you see Gyles the Third (he who precipitated the Great Southern War) as more Louis the Fourteenth or more Henry the Fifth? (the former being a king who was so overwhelmingly powerful he basically forced every other crowned head in his vicinity to posse up – the latter a king who sought to weld his Kingdom together through military glory and perished of dysentery in the process).

A bit of Henry V, a bit of Richard I as portrayed in The Lion in Winter (if you think of the High Spider as Phillip II Augustus).

How many nobles would have aegon needed to bring with him during the conquest in order to get a similar situation that we see in the doomsday book from William the conqueror Reign

Well, William the Conqueror landed with 7,000 to 12,000 men to conquer a land of ~2 million people, so that would suggest that you’d need about 200,000 men to have the same impact as the Normans did on England.

Did the High Sparrow accidentally save the Lannister Tyrell alliance by imprisoning Cersei because if he didn’t Cersei would have been in charge when Mace and Randyll arrived in Kings Landing with their armies?

Not really, Mace and Randyll marched on King’s Landing because Margaery was arrested at Cersei’s behest by the High Sparrow.

What are the reasons (Doyelist and/or Watsonian) behind the art of Ravencraft not spreading beyond the shores of the Seven Kingdoms, and if so, do you see this changing any time soon, especially considering whats going to happen to Oldtown when the Crows Eye comes a-calling? Thanx

There are other ways to transmit messages: the better your road networks, the faster you can move the mail; if you have the infrastructure to build optlical communications networks (heliographs, hydraulic telegraphs, semaphores) you can send messages much quicker and more reliably, etc.

As to why…my guess is that it has to do with ravenry coming out of warging and thus the lack of wargs in Essos meant that they developed other technologies.

Was the comment about Leyla Hightower drinking wine intended to be a double entendre (and a rather brutal one at that)?

I guess.

A query prompted by your excellent ‘High Spider’ piece: What do you imagine Tyrion Lannister’s career path would have been like if he had pursued his childhood ambition of entering the Faith?

Probably a high-ranking position either at Casterly Rock, Lannisport, or King’s Landing, a cushy post where he could spend a lot of time reading books and drinking wine.