From the author of the bestselling The Shortest History of Germany comes a bracing trot through the story of England that makes a complex history wonderfully accessible and throws up many connections and revelations hitherto unexplored.
The story of England as you've never seen it before.
In his bestselling, internationally-acclaimed The Shortest History of Germany, James Hawes told the story of a nation in 240 invigorating pages, tracing the roots of today's challenges back to the first encounters with Rome. In The Shortest History of England, he takes the same approach to his homeland.
As he journeys from Caesar to Brexit via Conquest, Empire and World War, he discovers an England very different to the standard vision. Our stable island fortress, stubbornly independent, the begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, is riven by an ancient fault-line that predates even the Romans; its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours, whether we like it or not; and - for the past 1,000 years - it has harboured a class system like nowhere else on Earth.
There has never been a better time to understand why England is the way it is, and there is no better guide.
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
ISBN: 9781910400999
Number of pages: 240
As with his superb 'Shortest History of Germany', James Hawes takes things at a gallop, and it's hard to resist the sweep of this chatty and irreverant book. This is history as fun, with not a cobweb in... More
I suppose most of us know about some English History but this covers a great deal in an easy read. Not too dense.
A feverish read which made it feel a little fragmented and over-factually dense. Perhaps the book tried to achieve too much in 270+ pages. Despite so much packed into it you end up leaving with very little.
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