Shortest History of England, The

James Hawes’s The Shortest History of Germany was the bestselling history book of 2018. In 240 invigorating pages, it told the story of a nation, tracing the roots of today’s challenges back to the first encounters with Rome.

In The Shortest History of England, Hawes turns his gaze to his homeland. As he journeys from Caesar to Brexit via Conquest, Empire and World War, he discovers an England very different from the standard vision. Our stable island fortress, stubbornly independent, the begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, is riven by an ancient fault-line that predates even the Romans; its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours, whether we like it or not; and – for the past 1,000 years – it has harboured a class system like nowhere else on Earth.

There has never been a better time to understand why England is the way it is – and there is no better guide.