A Short History of England - Simon Jenkins

The history of England is one of the longest continuous tales of any nation. A recognisable English nation emerged during the Anglo-Saxon era and has remained intact ever since. This gives England over a 1,000 years of unbroken history. Any attempt to tell this tale in only a few hundred pages must be described as ambitious but this is what Simon Jenkins has attempted to do.

Inevitably any short version of the history of England cannot include everything, and this is certainly the case here. Sensibly the author has limited himself to the political history of England only. Other events, including those in the Celtic nations, are referred to only if they impact the political events in England. This gives the book a focus and a narrowness of narrative that allows the story to race along. This keeps it to its intention to be short albeit at the cost that you are always aware there is a lot going on off-stage.

One of the great strengths of the writing in this book is that I felt it was a continuous story. Although periods of time may have been raced through quickly, it always felt that they had been covered. This is a difficult trick to pull off as there was the odd occasion where it felt that something had been taken out during editing (presumably to keep the book short). For example, the first mention of Robert Walpole, England's first Prime Minister, was to say that he had resigned. These were few though and the writing was good enough that I couldn't spot any gaps in the historical narrative where an earlier mention of Walpole had been lost.

For me one of the great frustrations of reading a book like this is feeling the urge to want more on certain episodes in England's history. Inevitably this book does not provide much by way of depth to history but the fact I wanted to know more was probably the intention of the author. This book is not written to provide it, it is there to give an overview of English history for those who want just that, and as a starting point for those who want more. On both of these, this does an excellent job.