Well I didn’t really give much more thought to the Plantagenets than any other royal family until my cousin Nancy began researching our family history. It seems my ancestor James Ives (1775-1802) convinced (bamboozled) this rather wealthy girl from a well connected family in Boston to marry him. Her name was Anna Ashley (1782-1822). So far research has not brought to light exactly how James was in a position to marry so well. His livelihood is murky, so he must have been charming or attractive or at the very least a smooth talker. The interesting thing about this marriage is that it insured that at least a thimble-full of Plantagenet blood is circulating in my body. Henry VIII began the process of breaking away from Rome for political and dynastic reasons, not because he was swayed by the new teachings of Luther or Calvin. By the end of his reign, the monasteries were destroyed, much of the church lands and treasure confiscated and the monarch was head of the Church in England. These astonishingly frequent errors clearly undermine the general authority of the book; but even cleaned up, I think it would fail to convince. And Innovation is an odd title to choose when you have so little interest in technology and scientific breakthroughs. The internet, the discovery of antibiotics, nuclear power and many other things with specific English connections are passed over either in silence or with the briefest possible mention. The Book of Common Prayer effectively set the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for the future. Not that it should be overlooked, the point is important enough I won’t discuss that. But it fills 80% of the book, the rest being succession issues and unimportant details. To say it left me wanting is an understatement.

He takes his readers from the construction of Stonehenge to the establishment of cathedrals and common law, which were two of the great glories of medieval England. He takes us to the most distant past of England to a medieval manor house, a Saxon tomb, a Roman fort and a Neolithic stirrup that was discovered in an ancient grave. But there’s no denying that we are becoming increasingly skeptical about these grandly inclusive tours d’horizon. They seem to leave a lot out: the experience of women and the working classes and other outsiders often enter only when the ruling elite decides to offer them education, the vote or previously withheld opportunities. Perhaps these massive narratives will disappear like Debenhams, or go into a long, old-fashioned decline like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Or perhaps they will change into something new. David Kynaston’s wonderful sequence of books about postwar Britain, the latest volume of which is just out, is rooted not in Acts of Parliament but in individual voices, often quite unknown. Dominic Sandbrook’s highly enjoyable books of the same period are unusually responsive to the fast-changing texture of popular culture and are much more evocative than many narrative histories. The author offers thoughtful new insights into age-old discussions of English history. I particularly enjoyed the way the chapters alternate between narratives about the people in power, and descriptions of everyday life. It would go on to become a critically acclaimed series which was peculiar as such readers are not known for loving history. For his work early on he got a nomination from the Royal Society of Literature.The book is quite startlingly inaccurate on dozens of occasions. George VI became king in 1936, not 1937. The famous 1933 Oxford Union motion about not fighting for king and country is significantly misquoted. How Elgar could be regarded as one of the two most successful British composers in the 1930s escapes me: he wrote nothing of any importance after 1919 and was painfully out of fashion by the time he died in 1934. Mrs Thatcher didn’t ‘form a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’, at Yuri Andropov’s funeral in 1984. She wanted to meet him, but was rebuffed. She first met him on his trip to the UK at the end of the year, three months before he became General Secretary. It wasn’t the ‘leader of East Germany’ who announced the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but an ill-informed Günter Schabowski, by mistake. The novel of Kingsley Amis’s that Thatcher was so dismissive about (‘Huh! Get another crystal ball!’) is not about ‘a communist take-over of Britain’ but a Russian occupation — communism having long been replaced by feudalism. And so on. We are led from the very early days of the native peoples right through a series of conquests and colonisation, wars, famous battles and rivalries, mythical figures and folklore, up until the end of Henry VII. Though he claims it's a history of England and the people, it more honestly a history of the Kings of England during this period, each chapter taking them one at a time. I have to say, that suits me fine but it seems to have annoyed some. We do start to get a sense of England as it develops, slowly, usually through inconsequential turns of events and chance occurrences but it's far from the main focus. Between the main chapters are shorter vignettes into various aspects of daily life, the food, agriculture, playthings etc. that make up life. They're good but over too soon. However, it was his bad attitude towards parliament that resulted in the deep divisions that almost tore the country apart during the reign of Charles I, his heir. The publishing of this work showed his tendency to creatively reexamine and explore the works of several London based authors. Elizabeth I to her credit though did not like war; as she said, “My mind was never to invade my neighbors.” The English possession of 211 years on port of Calais is lost. It had cost a fortune to upkeep. Elizabeth I spoke Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. She was rarely (if ever) alone. She restored debased coinage to its real value. Mary is forced to abdicate in Scotland and is replaced by James VI. Timber and clay houses are replaced by stone and plaster. Elizabeth I wore the first wristwatch in 1572. The French could be violent douchebags too: “Count Orsini had told the French king that not one Huguenot should be left alive in France.” The Anabaptists are tortured during Elizabeth’s reign for saying Christians shouldn’t be carrying swords. Getting tortured for believing in Christian non-violence. Torture was a royal prerogative in matters of the state. In an exceedingly rare appearance by the real God, on January 12, 1583, the stand of a bear-pit collapses killing many spectators (one hopes the bears dined well that night and the meat wasn’t too tough).

The shifts of religious practice, decreed from the centre, were fiercely resisted. Rebellions broke out. Charges of heresy were levelled by each side against the other; when religion was so tightly tied to politics and power, being declared a heretic could be seen as treason. The punishment for heresy was burning at the stake; that for treason was to be hung, drawn and quartered (no, I’m not going into details), or beheaded if you were an aristocrat. It would be difficult to find a more informative and entertaining volume. You are drawn into the barbarity of much of English history and entertained by the more whimsical descriptions of life, particularly in the middle ages. It is probably not easy to write an account of English history that would satisfy both the layman and the expert and that would cover all the aspects and choose the vantage point every potential reader could wish for, and so all I can say is that if you want to read a history focusing on the monarchy and its representatives and adding vignettes of everyday history in between, this is the right book for you. At the start of the sixteenth century, England was a country that was very medieval and often found direction in Rome. Ultimately, it would become a country where not the church but the state was charged with good governance and where women and men began to look for answers in themselves rather than in their rulers.In Foundation, the chronicler of London and of its river, the Thames, takes us from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death, in 1509, of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows us glimpses of the country's most distant past--a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house--and describes in rich prose the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French.