It is hard to overpraise this admirable – indeed one would have thought impossible – account of the history of England, Scotland and Ireland from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his son Charles II. The great masters of English 17th-century historiography, S. R. Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, between them took nearly 30 volumes and even then did not quite make it to the finish. But this even-paced, readable, good-natured and wise volume not only tells the reader what happened and when but gives him a clear impression of the individual actors, large-minded and generous, without being blind to weakness, folly or vindictiveness and above all not fitting them into a preconceived explanation of the most dramatic and perhaps the most formative series of events in our political history.
Political? Yes, political.
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