One Thousand Years of Trouble-making from the Normans to the Nineties

The English Rebel

A superb losers' history of England [told] with narrative verve and delicious detail

An unfailingly lucid, immensely readable, and above-all clear-eyed account of an indomitable strand in our national story

An exciting, accessible story. Horspool uncovers the hearty, dangerous energy of British politics.  We are a nation of rebels, whose history has been shaped by stirrers of every kind

Highly impressive. Could almost be a one-volume guide to English history.

David Horspool read History at Oxford, and is History Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Why Alfred Burned the Cakes, and he writes for the TLS, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and New York Times.

The English have a rich and glorious history of making trouble for themselves. One hundred and forty years before the French Revolution, the English executed their king and instituted a radical revolutionary government. In 1215, more than 570 years before the United States ratified its Bill of Rights, England's barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta. In 1926 over 1.5 million strikers brought the nation to its knees. 
 
From the Peasants' Revolt to the suffragettes, from Oliver Cromwell to Arthur Scargill, this ground-breaking and hugely enjoyable book describes a rich and continuous tradition of resistance, rebellion and radicalism, of violent and charismatic individuals with axes to grind, and of social eruptions and political earthquakes that have shaped England's whole culture and character.

David Horspool

England's Protector

Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him. 
 
Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.

David Horspool

Books by David Horspool

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