Foundation: The History of England Volume I

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He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987. Eleven years prior to Henry’s break with Rome, you’d be burned for reading an English Bible, but now every English Church had to have one. When one is used to flyover looks at 30,000' about the reigns of individual rulers, with one major ruler per chapter, it is a different experience to slow down the look at spend roughly the same amount of pages talking about the reigns of one dynasty of rulers over the course of less than a century that one spent on thousands of years of English history. Altogether, it is a very vivid and remarkable portrait of the past that Ackroyd paints, and it is not to be doubted that the author draws on extensive knowledge although I think that I would have preferred for him to throw in some footnotes now and then. But more importantly there are those absolutely stunning sentences of his that really make you think, such as his description of Elizabeth and her councilors, “It was the central dilemma of her reign, with the strength and solitariness of one woman pitched against a phalanx of men” (350-351).

Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. Athelstan, son of Alfred, in particular is of interest because he is considered the first King of England where Alfred was referred to as the King of the Angles and of the Saxons. He takes his readers from the construction of Stonehenge to the establishment of cathedrals and common law, which were two of the great glories of medieval England. The previous book in the series covered a huge swathe of time and was very wide angle - necessarily, he slows down and zooms in here. To read more about the site or if you want a graphic to link to us, see the about page for more details.I am a native of the English county of Wiltshire which contains both the site of Stonehenge and the Avebury Ring. Peter Ackroyd, who I have always thought of as a novelist, has probably written about as many nonfiction books as he has novels. The work explores the transformation of England to a superpower from its beginnings as a settled Catholic country.

The bibliography is interesting enough, though it seems to me the author has used too many sources that are a bit too far into the past considering the plethora of specialist historians at present churning out tomes about specifics.But he also gives us a vivid sense of how England's early people lived: the homes they built, the clothes the wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. It says a great deal for Ackroyd's fluent, easy style, that I read this 470 page history in just three days. Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). A very readable history of the Tudor dynasty although it starts at the death of its founder, Henry VII. While Ackroyd focuses on the big events – Henry’s love life, Elizabeth and Mary – he uses them to highlight the heavier and perhaps more important issue that circulates though England during the time of the Tudors.

Peter tells of the cataclysmic break of England with Rome brought about by Henry VIII due to his relentless pursuit of the perfect heIr and perfect wife. I found the first few chapters too brief, almost listing events and changes without much sense of significance. This happened many centuries before the Romans conquered the island for the fertile lands to provide grain for a hungry citizenship back home. In a 2012 interview with Matthew Stadlen of the BBC, when asked the question, "Who do you think is the person who has made the biggest impact upon the life of this country ever? One I particularly liked, and so did he, obviously, because he refers to it at least twice, is that the measurement of the yard (0.

It is very odd to claim that ‘the BBC [during the Falklands War] was not always a friend to Thatcher, but here, perhaps for the last time, she found in it an ally’. With the wealth of material, it would be easy to get bogged down in details and miss the bigger picture.