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English History Made Brief, Irreverent and Pleasurable
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About the Book“...a short, breezy, and at times delightfully wry version of 2,000-plus years of English history. Smith...has created a book that may be slight, but is always effortlessly enjoyable.”—The Bloomsbury Review Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight the armchair traveler, the tourist or just about anyone interested in history. No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so much censure as the English: extolled as the Athenians of modern times, yet hammered for their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. But their history has been a spectacular one. The guiding principle of this book’s heretical approach is that “history is not everything that happened, but what is worth remembering about the past. . . .” Thus, its chapters deal mainly with “Memorable History” in blocks of time over the centuries. The final chapter “The Royal Soap Opera,” recounts the achievements, personalities and idiocies of the royal family since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. Spiced with dozens of hilarious cartoons from Punch and other publications, English History will be a welcome and amusing tour of a land that has always fascinated Americans—Anglophiles and Anglophobes alike. About the AuthorLacey Baldwin Smith is Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University and author of a number of histories and biographies, including Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty; Elizabeth Tudor: Portrait of a Queen; Treason in Tudor England, Politics and Paranoia and Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World, among others. He lives with his wife, Jean, in Illinois and Vermont. They have two daughters. |
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