The English and Their History [Paperback]

Named a Book of the Year by theDaily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist

The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. 
 
Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive,The English and Their Historyis the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.Named a Book of the Year by theDaily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator,andThe Economist

Spectacular and massive. . . . It's a book for our times that should also become the standard text for the century to come. —David Frum,The Atlantic

“The English and Their History,” by Robert Tombs, is right to combine a fresh retelling of English history with a thoughtful analysis of the changing ways in which the English themselves have interpreted their past. It successfully does both. . . . In this book he bicycles ­pleasingly through the picturesque valleys and stormy moorlands of England’s long adversarial struggle with itself. . . .  Tombs entertainingly describes England’s frequent aggressive adventures into othl¢