The bigger picture

Many among you, I know, have been fretting that thanks to a combination of political correctness, New Labour educational policy and the European Union’s usurpation of everything the free-born Englishman holds dear, big-picture narrative history is on the point of vanishing from the earth. All that our children’s children will know of British history, you worry, will be a vague sense of how beastly the Nazis were to Mary Seacole. Well, there is good news for you. Here are two new histories (of England, mind — not of Britain) by two of our best writers. Gosh, though. They could scarcely be more different.

Peter Ackroyd’s is very long — or promises to be. Foundation is only the first in a projected six-volume history running from the origins of Stonehenge (‘The Druids: no one knows who they were, or what they were doing’ —Spinal Tap. Ackroyd agrees) to the turn of the 21st century.