Blair Worden

This is a brief overview of the events leading up to the English Civil War, the wars themselves, the regicide, republic, and restoration.

To be honest, it is too brief, and it's really difficult to see what the point of writing such a small book describing twenty years of tumultuous history might be. There's hardly any detail of the major events; mostly it is about the political and social context for these events. About the only thing that I found informative in this book was Worden's description of the battles for religious supremacy that accompanied the struggle for temporal power during that period.

For people with a real interest in the Civil War, I would recommend reading one of the countless works that deal with them in detail, and I can't really see why anybody else would want to read this at all.… (more)

This book is the result of a conference that took place in Oxford to commemorate Trevor-Roper’s life, and some of the individual pieces are based on talks given by the contributors at the conference. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of Trevor-Roper’s interests, ranging from classical literature to Hitler studies. Trevor-Roper had many writings that were not published in his lifetime, and although several books have been published posthumously, there still remains much unpublished material. The contributors provide context to his writings, often by digging into the unpublished materials, letters and other sources. The book is a good fit with the Sisman biography.… (more)

A lot of people from other countries are surprised that most people my age in the UK know little about certain periods of our history. For me one of there periods centres around the wars between the Crown and characters like Oliver Cromwell. I picked to this book as a introduction to this subject with the hope that it would provide an easy to read overview. It does provide an overview but not necessarily an easy read. However, my biggest gripe is that you will need to have previous knowledge of most of the people and the different religious groups involved to get the most out of this.… (more)