The Shortest History of England

The shortest history of England by James Hawes offers a fast-paced sweep through England's history, from the Roman conquest to Brexit, aimed at readers who want the big picture without wading through a doorstop volume.

Hawes argues that England has never really been the isolated island fortress of popular imagination, but a nation whose fate has been repeatedly bound up with events on the European continent, and traces an ancient geological and cultural fault-line that, he suggests, has shaped a persistent north-south, class-inflected divide running through more than a thousand years of English history.

Following on from his earlier Shortest History of Germany, Hawes distils centuries of complex, contested history into a brisk, opinionated narrative that draws surprising lines between the deep past and the political arguments of today.