English History Made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable by Lacey Baldwin Smith

English History Made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable by Lacey Baldwin Smith

Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight the armchair traveler, the tourist, or just about anyone interested in history.

No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so much censure as the English: extolled as the Athenians of modern times, yet hammered for their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. But their history has been a spectacular one.

The guiding principle of this book's heretical approach is that history is not everything that happened but what is worth remembering about the past. Thus its chapters deal mainly with Memorable History in blocks of time over the centuries. The final chapter, The Royal Soap Opera, recounts the achievements, personalities, and idiocies of the royal family since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. Spiced with dozens of hilarious cartoons from Punch and other publications, English History will be a welcome and amusing tour of a land that has always fascinated Anglophiles and Anglophobes alike.

Lacey Baldwin Smith was an Emeritus Professor of History at Northwestern University and the author of numerous Tudor-era works. He was a Fulbright Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of London, a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his MA and PhD from Princeton University.