Overview

Interweaving personal and historical narratives and making use of contemporary sources, Graham Robb’s lively exploration of Britain through the ages peels back the layers of this island nation and shows how it came to be. We follow Robb as he travels along the warpaths of long-forgotten kings, under the chalk ramparts and grassy folds of ancient hill-towns, down the ghost trails of Roman and Saxon streets. Armed with poignant observations and an infectious love for his subject, Robb recounts the epic stories of wars and conquests, of feuding kings and rebellious peasants, of innovations and upheavals, from the creation of Stonehenge to the dawn of the railway, from the advent of multiculturalism to the recent political earthquakes—distilling a social, political, and geographical history of Britain that is at once panoramic and intimate, poignant and entertaining.

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9781324074946

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Filled with curiosities. … Ambitious, with a tinge of eccentricity and perfectly grown-up enough to sustain the occasional disagreement, this is a rich pleasure of a book."" -- Philip Hensher - The Spectator ""Careful research is mixed with an aptly freewheeling approach, allowing the reader to experience the past as an adventure powered as much by accident as incident. Rarely does history feel so beguiling."" -- The Observer ""This is a book as much about the experience of history as history itself. … Learned and likeable."" -- Sunday Times ""If you’d like a linear kings and battles history go elsewhere as Robb is more interested in overlooked details, coincidences and accidents of history and digging up evidence that questions or subverts what we’ve all been taught to think about this country. … Mind-blowing. … He has the superb ability of taking a single off-kilter subject (say, boarding schools and playing cricket) and widening it out to illuminate something much larger."" -- Shortlist ""A dazzling and dizzyingly wonderful roam through Britain’s past. This is history writing as you’ve never read it before."" -- Jack Cornish, author of The Lost Paths ""Rediscovers Britain’s past in unexpected ways, melding memory and observation with history and geography."" -- Brian Groom, author of Made in Manchester ""Graham Robb tumbles into British history with an infectious enthusiasm. … Immensely entertaining."" -- Chris Bryant, author of The Glamour Boys

""A dazzling and dizzyingly wonderful roam through Britain’s past. This is history writing as you’ve never read it before."" -- Jack Cornish, author of The Lost Paths ""Rediscovers Britain’s past in unexpected ways, melding memory and observation with history and geography."" -- Brian Groom, author of Made in Manchester ""Graham Robb tumbles into British history with an infectious enthusiasm. . . . Immensely entertaining."" -- Chris Bryant, author of The Glamour Boys

Author Information

Graham Robb is the author of several award-winning books on literature and history. His book The Discovery of France won both the Duff Cooper and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prizes. For Parisians, the city of Paris awarded him the Grande Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He lives on the English–Scottish border.

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