British History

The Anglo-Saxons: The Making of England: 410–1066 (Marc Morris)

England, fabled land of legend and destiny, is over. When you combine a degraded native populace unwilling to replenish itself with a ruling class that is among the most evil and stupid in history,...

The Making of Oliver Cromwell (Ronald Hutton)

If you know anything about Oliver Cromwell—and few do nowadays— you probably have an opinion about the man. Some vilify him; “A curse upon you, Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our Motherland,” the Irish...

Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding (Hannah Farber)

Property insurance is everywhere, but it is rarely prominent in the public mind. Its internal workings are obscure, full of technical language, esoteric customs, and mind-numbing legalese.

The Fate of Empires (John Bagot Glubb)

What Americans need now is a cheery book that assures us how our global power and hegemony are destined to last, if not forever, for a good deal longer. This is not that book....

Dark Emu (Bruce Pascoe)

Americans do not understand Australia. At all. If Australia is brought up, they think of a few movie and television stars. They think of a vast red desert, perhaps, with a big rock, what’s-its-name...

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Karl Polanyi)

The Great Transformation, published in 1944, is an ambitious book. It attempts two huge tasks. First, to refute the free market ideology, sometimes called market fundamentalism, represented at that time by men such as...

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (James Fitzjames Stephen)

Among the many idols of our age, there is one that rules them all: John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, the belief that an individual’s choices may never be legitimately hampered, by anyone at all,...

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Tom Shippey)

In these days where man is held to be homo economicus, we are told that all people are basically the same, and what they want, most of all, is ease and comfort. Real Vikings...

Hired: Undercover in Low-Wage Britain (James Bloodworth)

James Bloodworth, an English sometime Trotskyite, has written a book which combines the television series Undercover Boss and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. He took jobs in a variety of...

Letters from an American Farmer (J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur)

This is a strange little Colonial-era book that, nonetheless, tells us something about America today. It was written by a protean Frenchman, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. Born French, in Caen, he fought...