ROBERT TOMBS

In ''''The English and their History'''', the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades, Robert Tombs gives us the history of the English people, and of how the stories they have told about themselves have shaped them, from the prehistoric dreamtime through to the present dayIf a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. They 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 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 todays 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 beginning a new period in their long history. Especially at times of change, history can help us to think about the sort of people we are and wish to be. This book, 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 yet also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.

The acclaimed account of the English people, now updated with two new chaptersMasterful, an enormously readable narrative of the English people from the Anglo-Saxons to the present Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the YearIn The English and their History, the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades, Robert Tombs gives us the history of the English people, and of how the stories they have told about themselves have shaped them, from the prehistoric dreamtime through to the present day.As ambitious as it is successful . . . Packed with telling detail and told with gentle, sardonic wit, a vast and delightful book Ben MacIntyre, The Times, Books of the YearA stupendous achievement ... a story of a people we cant fail to recognize: stoical, brave, drunken, bloody-minded, violent, undeferential, yet paradoxically law-abiding ... I found myself gripped Daniel Hannan, SpectatorOriginal and enormously readable, this brilliant, hugely engaging work has a sly wit and insouciance that are of themselves rather English Sinclair MacKay, Daily Telegraph

THE TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERGeography comes before history. Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.In this succinct book, Tombs shows that the decision to leave the EU is historically explicable - though not made historically inevitable - by Britains very different historical experience, especially in the twentieth century, and because of our more extensive and deeper ties outside Europe. He challenges the orthodox view that Brexit was due solely to British or English exceptionalism: in choosing to leave the EU, the British, he argues, were in many ways voting as typical Europeans.

Cet ouvrage retrace avec humour et élégance lhistoire dune guerre sans fin entre la France et lAngleterre, un couple historique sans équivalent. Cette relation est unique dans lhistoire moderne, non seulement par sa longevite et sa profondeur culturelle, economique et politique, mais aussi pour ses consequences mondiales. Un ouvrage passionnant grace au regard croise dun historien anglais (Robert Tombs) et dune historienne française (Isabelle Tombs).

There is a need to tell a better story about Britain because bad stories are being told. These are bad in the sense both of doing the historical facts an injustice, and of causing damaging political effects. One bad story currently dominant is one that portrays Britain as a systemically racist country, whose racism is rooted in its colonial history, which was nothing but a litany of worldwide oppression and exploitation. This bad story has real-time political consequences.A Better Story About Britain will counter these stories with a better one more historically honest, more appreciative of the legacy of Britains past, and more hopeful about Britains future.

From Blenheim and Waterloo to Up Yours, Delors and Hop Off You Frogs, the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration and affection. In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on peace and war, for good and ill, has shaped the modern world, from North America to India in the eighteenth century, in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is still shaping Europe today. This magisterial book, by turns provocative and delightful, always fascinating, tells the rich and complex story of the relationship over three centuries, from the beginning of the great struggle for mastery during the reign of Louis XIV to the second Iraq War and the latest enlargement of the EU. It tells of wars and battles, ententes and alliances, but also of food, fashion, sport, literature, sex and music. Its cast ranges from William and Mary to Tony Blair, from Voltaire to Eric Cantona; its sources from ambassadorial dispatches to police reports, from works of philosophy to tabloid newspapers, from guidebooks to cartoons and films. Its a book which brings both British humour and Gallic panache to the story of these two countries, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, in victory and in defeat, in dominance and in decline.