England: The Autobiography

Nov 12, 2024 8:40 PM

Author:John Lewis-Stempel

DISCOVER 2,000 YEARS OF ENGLISH HISTORY TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT - FROM BOUDICCA'S REVOLT TO THE ASHES WIN OF 2005.

Featuring writing from Julius Caesar, Guy Fawkes, Isaac Newton, Charlotte Brontë, Winston Churchill and Jonny Wilkinson.

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Engine of Industrial Revolution, global empire, England's history is one of the most fascinating and influential the world has ever known. England: The Autobiography tells that history first-hand, through the words of those who saw it and those who made it.

All the great events of the last 2,000 years are here: the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Henry VIII's break with Rome, the Great Fire of London, two world wars. And alongside them are events that capture the nation's social history and those that shaped the nature of 'Englishness', such as the Black Death, theatregoing in Elizabethan London, the Beatles and the 1966 World Cup.

This book is an intimate, vivid and revealing portrait of England and the English - and the unique place of both in world history.

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'What does it mean to be English? Lewis-Stempel gives us a clue with this superb collection . . . A triumph' Saul David

Reviews

The Classical World is a more epic epic than any toga-clad celluloid epic to date... Mr Lane Fox's brilliant book, where soldiers, poets and orators fight for attention in a story that is never cluttered and always stimulating.

—— The Economist

witty, ferociously learned, enormously well read

—— Mary Beard, The Independent

an ambitious and exhilarating volume...The Classical World is so replete with insight and anecdote that I would love to see it in every school library.

—— Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

we are in the hands of an author who knows that an epic can only be driven by big characters such as Pericles, Demosthenes, Philip, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar and Cleopatra...Here lies the author's mastery, matching a lifelong familiarity with his subject to the basic needs of a newly arrived apprentice

—— Nigel Spivey, FT

[Robertson's] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not reached

—— Blair Worden , Literary Review

The writer who got closest to the human truth about our long-serving senior royals

—— The Times

This immense book is part masterpiece, part sheer exhaustion. The masterpiece part lies chiefly in its breathtaking invention

—— Jan Morris , The Times

Everywhere he goes, Mak is quietly ruthless in unmasking the acts of forgetting, selective amnesia, myth-making and historical obfuscation that persist...Mak is a truly cosmopolitan chronicler of shame and self-deceptions

—— David Goldblatt , Independent

His genius as a historian is his instinct for human stories... At moments in this monumental work... Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had

—— Simon Kuper , Financial Times

How eloquently Mak rails against the alliance of consumerism and bureaucracy! ... He has a great eye for telling detail... Only a powerful, humane and serious mind could give coherence to mass detail which, however arresting piece by piece, would otherwise soon become wearying... as much a journey around Geert Mak's head as it is a journey around Europe

—— Guardian

Fascinating

—— David V Barrett , Independent

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