leeroyuk's review
4.0
A really informative and entertaining read, and he certainly knows his historical onions. But it was marred by terrible syntax. There are so many sentences with long, meandering asides that you forget their original point.
microglyphics's review
3.0
History is not really my bag, but I decided to give this book a gander anyway. It's not bad, though a bit dense but informative. I listened to the audiobook because I couldn't hear the paper version, though the paper edition may be a better format for this.
sammystarbuck's review
3.0
First of all, this really should have been titled A brief history of England, rather than Britain, as apart from a couple of paragraphs on Scotland and Wales, the entire books is about England during that time, not the rest of Britain.
I thought the first half and the last quarter of this book very entertaining. It does what it says on the tin: it provides a brief overview of the major events and players of the time. If you're looking for an in-depth treatise on anything that happened during that particular time period, move along, this book won't help you. But what it does, it does pretty well, except (for me) for the third quarter of the book.
First of all the author managed to get my back up by referring to a certain king as "not autistic" because he had been observed showing emotions. WTF? Is he trying to infer that autistic people don't have emotions? Or that they don't show them? Both options are so laughably, utterly wrong that it clearly shows his complete ignorance on the subject of autism, and not having a clue of what he spoke, he should really not have gone there.
Then he went on to compare the Scottish to Afghani terrorists, for winning a battle against a better trained and equipped force that seriously outnumbered them. At this point I was mentally adding the guy to my list of people that were dropped repeatedly on the head as a baby, and came within a whisker of abandoning the rest of the book.
I persevered in the end, and the final quarter was much like the first half again. A shame about the few parts that made my blood boil, as I really enjoyed the tone of the book otherwise, and would probably have looked for more by the same author.
2 1/2 stars rounded up.
I thought the first half and the last quarter of this book very entertaining. It does what it says on the tin: it provides a brief overview of the major events and players of the time. If you're looking for an in-depth treatise on anything that happened during that particular time period, move along, this book won't help you. But what it does, it does pretty well, except (for me) for the third quarter of the book.
First of all the author managed to get my back up by referring to a certain king as "not autistic" because he had been observed showing emotions. WTF? Is he trying to infer that autistic people don't have emotions? Or that they don't show them? Both options are so laughably, utterly wrong that it clearly shows his complete ignorance on the subject of autism, and not having a clue of what he spoke, he should really not have gone there.
Then he went on to compare the Scottish to Afghani terrorists, for winning a battle against a better trained and equipped force that seriously outnumbered them. At this point I was mentally adding the guy to my list of people that were dropped repeatedly on the head as a baby, and came within a whisker of abandoning the rest of the book.
I persevered in the end, and the final quarter was much like the first half again. A shame about the few parts that made my blood boil, as I really enjoyed the tone of the book otherwise, and would probably have looked for more by the same author.
2 1/2 stars rounded up.
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