More vindictive than merry

At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on a muggy summer afternoon in 1658.’ All it needs is the dusty main street of the frontier town with two men, one all in black, facing each other against the sky, with one of Dmitri Tiomkin’s lush orchestral soundtracks gulping away in the background.

Another death — that of Charles I by execution on 29 January 1649 in Whitehall: carpenters are putting the finishing touches to his scaffold and, according to the authors, the sound awakens the King. Fair enough. Carpenters hammer, they saw: many of us have been woken by carpenters. But then Messrs Jordan and Walsh go further.