English History Made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable

Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight armchair travellers, tourists or anyone interested in history. No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so much censure as the English: extolled as the Athenians of modern times, yet hammered for their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. But their history has been a spectacular one. The guiding principle of this book's heretical approach is that "history is not everything that happened, but what is worth remembering about the past...". Its chapters deal mainly with 'Memorable History' in blocks of time over the centuries. The final chapter recounts the achievements, personalities and idiocies of the royal family since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. Spiced with dozens of hilarious cartoons from Punch and other publications, ENGLISH HISTORY is a welcome and amusing tour of a land that has always fascinated Anglophiles and Anglophobes alike.

Lacey Baldwin Smith was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1922. Following graduate work at Princeton University, he went on to teach there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University, where until his retirement he was Professor of History and Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities. He continues to teach at Northwestern in an emeritus capacity. Smith is the recipient of two Fulbright awards, two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other awards, honors, and academic appointments, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smith passed away September 2013.