The English and Their History
Robert TombsNamed a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, & The Economist
The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler & 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 & 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 & 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, & not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it & yet been shaped by it. Momentous & definitive, The English & Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.
ROBERT TOMBS is professor of history at the University of Cambridge & a leading scholar of Anglo-French relations. His most recent book, That Sweet Enemy: The French & the British from the Sun King to the Present, co-authored with his wife, Isabelle Tombs, is the first large-scale study of the relationship between the French & the British over the last three centuries.