the Black Death
It seemed like the end of days: the eerie wasteland of 14th-century Europe
The Black Death combined with the Hundred Years’ War left the Continent a desolate world, full of terror and foreboding
The monk’s tale
In an essay for Prospect a few years back the writer Leo Benedictus noticed how many contemporary novels used what…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
Brave, drunken, violent and law-abiding
Here is a stupendous achievement: a narrative history of England which is both thorough and arresting. Very few writers could…
The parlour-game approach
A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which…
