Another great addition to The History of England series. ( )

Probably too low a rating, but i wanted to use this book as a modern companion to Macauley and it just doesn't work. The history is so loose it just slips away. Yes, it covers much wider ground than Macauley- social context, new movements and so forth. Yes, that's useful / important... but i'm not so interested, so - for me- this book just doesn't really carry it for me. Did not finish- went back to Macauley to re-read as that is a better use of my precious read time.

Another interesting book in Peter Ackroyd’s series on the history of England. I definitely think Ackroyd’s work is suited to being in a series like this: from where he started to where the finish point is in the fifth and final book, the “history of England” covers a large expanse of time, and even land if you include the British Empire in that history. Revolution, as a fourth book in this series, did its job in telling England’s history through the revolutions that happened: the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution (where it was relevant), the Glorious Revolution, and more. There were parts of the book that felt slow (almost too slow), but this was an enjoyable read. ( )

The Revolution here is The Industrial Revolution - not that anyone described it as such at the time. But the Revolution that led to the massive expansion of the urban population, the establishment of an Empire based on trade, the establishment and oppression of a working class and a reinvention of the social order based on money rather than land, is well described and observed by Ackroyd. But as ever with this series, its long on description and short on analysis. Events happen, they are described, but we don't know why they happened.

Ackroyd is as ever much happier with the "great man" approach to history (and it is "man" - there's not a female voice to be heard here) than with social history. So we hear of the mastery of Walpole and both Pitts, the perfidy of Fox and sundry Whigs, and much of their personal foibles but very little of what their policies were, or why they succeeded or failed. Hanoverian kings arrive, preside and die, but we learn little of their priorities. George III suffers from porphyria - but there is little explanation of what this means and why his "madness" would come and go. America is lost, in the space of a few pages; there seems to be no particular consequences of this. The French Revolution arrives, with little discussion of its causes, other than hunger. Napoleon arrives, wins and loses battles, and disappears also in the space of a few pages, with no analysis of the cause of his success. For sure, this is a history of England, but factors outside of England have an influence on English events

The social upheavals caused by the Revolution are quite well handled, but again things seem to just happen rather than there being any analysis of their cause. Its easy enough to work out why the gin abuse epidemic took hold, but why did it stop as quickly as it started, to be replaced by tea of all things?

So why the relatively high rating? Because it is entertainingly written and the action skips along. But be aware that this is a narrative overview of the history of the period, rather than a detailed study ( )

Less gripping than Ackroyd's previous volumes (perhaps due to the social history), although there are some wonderful chapters, I read this over two years. ( )