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librarianonparade's review
3.0
While there are many candidates for 'most eventful year in English history', 1666 has to be up there with them. Several years into the Restoration, it was perhaps one of the defining years of Charles II's reign - the year of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the year of the Great Plague and most memorable of all, the year of the Great Fire of London. You know something's historic when it gets capitalised.
This is the year Alexander Larman focuses on as the prism through which to view Restoration England, Restoration London and Charles II himself. Taking a thematic approach, from the food people ate to the way they dressed, from the aristocracy to the beggars on the street, the trades people pursued and the criminals they apprehended, this is a potted history of a particularly iconic and memorable period in English history.
Sadly though, potted is all this is. Larman is a good writer and he brings this time and place to life, but it's just too short to really do justice to the era. One can't help but feel, reading this book, that it was a quick and easy write cobbled together from the research he'd already undertaken in his biography of the notorious Earl of Rochester, who flits in and out of these pages. I felt disappointed and almost cheated reading this book, because I enjoyed it, I wanted more, and I felt the author was wasting his abilities somewhat by cutting corners.
This is the year Alexander Larman focuses on as the prism through which to view Restoration England, Restoration London and Charles II himself. Taking a thematic approach, from the food people ate to the way they dressed, from the aristocracy to the beggars on the street, the trades people pursued and the criminals they apprehended, this is a potted history of a particularly iconic and memorable period in English history.
Sadly though, potted is all this is. Larman is a good writer and he brings this time and place to life, but it's just too short to really do justice to the era. One can't help but feel, reading this book, that it was a quick and easy write cobbled together from the research he'd already undertaken in his biography of the notorious Earl of Rochester, who flits in and out of these pages. I felt disappointed and almost cheated reading this book, because I enjoyed it, I wanted more, and I felt the author was wasting his abilities somewhat by cutting corners.
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