Robert Tombs. (2015). The English and Their History. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Robert Tombs. 2015. The English and Their History. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Robert Tombs, The English and Their History. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Robert Tombs. The English and Their History. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • value: English
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Tombs, Robert
   • bioText: ROBERT TOMBS is professor of history at the University of Cambridge and a leading scholar of Anglo-French relations. His most recent book, That Sweet Enemy: The French and 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 and the British over the last three centuries.
   • name: Robert Tombs

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2015-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The English and Their History

fullDescription

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book
Robert Tombs’s momentous The English and Their History is both a startlingly fresh and a uniquely inclusive account of the people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. The English first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history.
The English have come a long way from those first precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today’s England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity.
Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly embarking on a new chapter. The English and Their History, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division and also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: David Frum, The Atlantic
   • content: "Spectacular and massive. . . . It's a book for our times that should also become the standard text for the century to come."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Peter Hitchens, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "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 other people's countries, not least its immediate ­neighbors."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Ben Macintyre, The Times (Books of the Year)
   • content: "As ambitious as it is successful....Packed with telling detail and told with gentle, sardonic wit, this vast and delightful book is exactly the weapon to throw at those who apologise for the past, denigrate the present and fear the future."
4. • premium: False
   • source: David Horspool, The Guardian
   • content: "In his massive, engaging and persuasive new book, Robert Tombs speaks up for English history, and sometimes for England itself."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
   • content: "Tombs has succeeded magnificently. Learned, pithy and punchy, with a laudable sense of narrative sweep and a bracing willingness to offer bold judgments, his survey is a tremendous achievement, and deserves to become the standard history for years to come....All in all, Tombs's book is a superb feat of compression and analysis."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Christopher Silvester, Financial Times
   • content: "[A] compelling and intriguing analysis....vast in scope and full to the brim with scholarship that has been painstakingly absorbed only to be disgorged with an exhilarating mixture of conviction and lightness of touch."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph (Books of the Year)
   • content: "Conducting a vast yet readable and sharply focused tour through the ages, and contrasting the English with their Celtic and continental neighbours, the thread is the evolution and paradoxical elusiveness of Englishness....jammed with succulent nuggets."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: "The perfect starting point for anyone who wants to grapple with the complexity of the English question....[Tombs] writes beautifully; there isn't a lazy sentence in this text."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly (Starred)
   • content: "Commanding. . . . a brilliant distillation of a vast tale and arguably the finest one-volume history of any nation and people ever written. . . . Tombs succeeds, all the while clearly stating the bases for his judicious assessments. His lively coverage of social, cultural, and political history is dazzling. . . . It's hard to identify a source Tombs hasn't consulted or an apt quotation he's neglected to slip in. Comprehensive, authoritative, and readable to a fault, this book should be on the shelves of everyone interested in its subject."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus (Starred)
    • content: "Massive yet accessible. . . . wonderfully reasoned and tidily structured...surprisingly approachable. . . . lucid, engaging, and pleasantly nondidactic. ."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 28, 2015
      Proceeding from prehistoric times to the present at a commanding pace, Tombs (coauthor, with Isabelle Tombs, of That Sweet Enemy), an expert at the University of Cambridge on Franco-British relations, focuses on England and the English while paying due regard to their Irish, Scot, and Welsh compatriots. No one will confuse this work with the celebrated, sweeping multivolume histories of Macauley, Trevelyan, and Churchill, but this is nevertheless a brilliant distillation of a vast tale and arguably the finest one-volume history of any nation and people ever written. Rare is the historian who can maintain balance amid the interpretive snares posed by such a large subject poses, especially while making “memory and its creation an inherent part of the story.” But Tombs succeeds, all the while clearly stating the bases for his judicious assessments. His lively coverage of social, cultural, and political history is dazzling, while his compressed reviews of such complicated matters as the Civil War of the 1640s, Victorianism, and English “decline” may be unsurpassable. Everyone from King Arthur to the Hobbit makes an appearance. It’s hard to identify a source Tombs hasn’t consulted or an apt quotation he’s neglected to slip in. Comprehensive, authoritative, and readable to a fault, this book should be on the shelves of everyone interested in its subject. Maps and illus.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 1, 2015
      A massive yet accessible study of the historical and linguistic continuity that make up the English people. In a wonderfully reasoned and tidily structured book presented in one surprisingly approachable doorstop, English scholar of Anglo-French relations Tombs (History/Univ. of Cambridge; The Paris Commune, 1871, 1999, etc.) finds much to (quietly) celebrate in English history since ancient times, especially compared to the more violent convolutions that have plagued neighboring European and Asian states-France, Russia, China, and others. The author embarks on his narrative with an eye toward how the English have regarded and valued themselves, a "collective memory" as recorded in Latin as early as the eighth century by Northumbrian monk Bede. He noted the English people's significance as deriving from their early Christian conversion, allowing them early access to power and allies and a "much better chance of survival." Thus, Tombs sees English identity as coalescing around Christian ministries, centers of political, economic, and even military power. A "customary law" emerged, a strong administrative system based on the "scir" (shire), governed for the king and involving, most important, a widespread system of participation in government. The "community of the realm," as reinforced by the Magna Carta (1215) and incipient Parliament of 1258, allowed the political continuity to prevail even after the cataclysmic upheavals of the Norman Conquest (1066). Moreover, as Tombs emphasizes, the English language displayed extraordinary durability in the wake of the French invasion, moving from vernacular to officialese to law and poetry, becoming a "language for a nation." While England's history is enormously complex, Tombs sharply organizes it by galvanizing themes, from the devastating religious wars (1500-1700) and the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and Victorian era to the two world wars and the debate over "an age of decline." What the author calls a "national nonchalance" is perhaps surprising in light of this unique continuity of political structure and cultural treasures. European history buffs and readers undaunted by a 1,000-page history will find a lucid, engaging, and pleasantly nondidactic book, with helpful maps.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from October 15, 2015
      

      Memory and experiences formed and continues to sustain one of the oldest surviving nation-states today. These are Tombs's (history, Cambridge Univ.; That Sweet Enemy) unifying themes in his hefty single-volume history of the English people. The people, who took the name "English," emerged in the eighth century to establish an empire and by 1,000 CE had created the kingdom of England. In a fast-paced narrative, Tombs explores the characteristics--a sense of kinship, cultural similarity, participatory government, representative institutions--that have given the English their identity for the past millennium. Selectively taking material from the vast array of primary and secondary sources of English history, he integrates the process of memory and its creation into the story, emphasizing creators and carriers such as language, religious and political institutions, and historical writing. VERDICT Anglophiles interested in a one-volume, comprehensive history of England will savor this study, while scholars and professionals in political science and government will find in it useful perspectives. Thoroughly researched, the narrative flows effortlessly.--Glen Edward Taul, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

298

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A New York Times 2016 Notable Book
Robert Tombs’s momentous The English and Their History is both a startlingly fresh and a uniquely inclusive account of the people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. The English first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history.
The English have come a long way from those first precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today’s England. Robert Tombs draws out important...

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