The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Trouble-making from the Normans to the Nineties - Softcover

Horspool, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141025476 ISBN 13: 9780141025476

Publisher: Penguin, 2010

Synopsis

The English have a rich and glorious history of making trouble for themselves. One hundred and forty years before the French Revolution, the English executed their king and instituted a radical revolutionary government. In 1215, more than 570 years before the United States ratified its Bill of Rights, England's barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta. In 1926 over 1.5 million strikers brought the nation to its knees.

From the Peasants' Revolt to the suffragettes, from Oliver Cromwell to Arthur Scargill, this ground-breaking and hugely enjoyable book describes a rich and continuous tradition of resistance, rebellion and radicalism, of violent and charismatic individuals with axes to grind, and of social eruptions and political earthquakes that have shaped England's whole culture and character.

About this title

Review:

A superb losers' history of England [told] with narrative verve and delicious detail (Ferdinand Mount)

An unfailingly lucid, immensely readable, and above-all clear-eyed account of an indomitable strand in our national story (David Kynaston)

An exciting, accessible story. Horspool uncovers the hearty, dangerous energy of British politics. We are a nation of rebels, whose history has been shaped by stirrers of every kind (Diane Purkiss)

Highly impressive. Could almost be a one-volume guide to English history. (Noel Malcolm Sunday Telegraph)

Full of wit and scholarship (Peter Ackroyd The Times)

Book Description:

An intelligent and provocative survey of the recurring role of rebellion and resistance in English history, and of some of the mythologies to which this has given rise - Linda Colley

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0141025476
• ISBN 13: 9780141025476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496