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terrycurtis14's review against another edition
2.0
This is not a history book but a commentary on history. If you do not already have some familiarity with British history the book would be hard to follow. sometime I think Chesterton here is just too clever for his own (or my) good.
ehays84's review against another edition
3.0
It is rare that I give a Chesterton anything less than five stars, but this one was not his best. I still enjoyed it a lot and am encouraged to keep studying English history more after reading it, but my main problem with it is that he sets out to write a short/popular/people's history of England, and goes on to write something that you have to know an awful lot about English history to understand. I have taken several British history courses and would not consider myself a light-weight, but there was a fair bit here that I just did not get, particularly about the Whig/Tory political/bureaucratic history stuff of the 18th and 19th centuries. I think he was really writing against certain historiographical tendencies at his time, and he lost sight of readers like myself who would really have benefited from his warm, humane, witty, and genuine approach to understanding the world.
His main theme for British history is that of class structure. I don't think he would call it that exactly, but essentially his ideas in this book line up with his Distributism ideas. He is in favor of a Christendom model/medieval structure where actually he argues the monarchs most often defended the peasants against the true "bad guys" of the book:the landed aristocrats. He also is very much in favor of the guild system as a way to protect decent business interests.
I would not recommend this book unless you are a true student of English history and/or Chesterton.
His main theme for British history is that of class structure. I don't think he would call it that exactly, but essentially his ideas in this book line up with his Distributism ideas. He is in favor of a Christendom model/medieval structure where actually he argues the monarchs most often defended the peasants against the true "bad guys" of the book:the landed aristocrats. He also is very much in favor of the guild system as a way to protect decent business interests.
I would not recommend this book unless you are a true student of English history and/or Chesterton.
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