The royal road to ruin

The old Oxford Histories of England were trusty bestsellers bound in pale blue wrappers. Hugely authoritative but often dull, they provided confident narratives of kings and governments, together with a chapter or so on culture and economics. The Clarendon Press has begun to update the series, and several volumes of a New Oxford History have so far been published. Geoffrey Searle has spent a lifetime working on Edwardian England, and he is well qualified to provide a new overview.

This is no easy task. Searle’s massive book, over 900 pages long, is ambitious but uneven. For a start, there’s the problem whether a history which is really about Britain can still be described as a history of England. Spurred on by Blairite devolution, historians have spent much time in the past two decades pondering the meaning of Englishness and deconstructing ‘Britain’ into its component parts. It is no longer PC to title a book which is really about ‘The Isles’ a history of England.