A History Of Britain

by Richard Dargie

Covering the story of Britain in eight chronological sections – on prehistory, Roman Britain, the age of invaders and settlers, medieval, early modern, Georgian and Victorian Britain and the 20th century up to and beyond the millennium – Richard Dargie offers a rapid and very accessible survey of these islands†history, with timelines, text boxes on special topics and illustrations.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

335 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Maxwell Thornton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short, yet informative book on the history of Britain!

I learned about many topics from the druids to post-1815 British society!

[Bethan Botterill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book for £4 at The Works and if it was anymore than that I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.

If you’re into this sort of thing it’s really interesting, but because of how much it is covering there really isn’t a lot of detail. I found it to be quite boring until around the Victorian era and I ended up skipping a few pages. It’s helpful that each paragraph has a heading because then you can pick and choose what you want to read and the timelines are good to get a quick overview of that time period.

The thing that annoyed me the most was that the last word in the book does not have a full stop after it. If it was intentional, then why?

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfect for a broad overview of the group of islands we’ve come to know as the UK—

[Leahy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can I just say I purchased this in The Works (Brits will know) for £3 and that fact makes me stupidly pleased. I wanted to get a very basic understanding of the history of Britain, to locate the topics within that which most interested me. This book is a perfect way to getting a "brief" history of Britain, and is divided into very simple chapters of the country.

Published fairly recently the author covers History from way back to the neanderthals all the way to dreaded Brexit in 2016, in fact he only just missed the COVID pandemic which I'm sure would've been a whole extra chapter.

Of course this book is very simplistic, it needs to be to cover thousands of years in under 300 pages. Nothing major is skipped, but a few events were overlooked or very very brief. There were plenty of helpful pictures and diagrams to accompany the written explanations, including a running graph of the increase in population.

This book is a great History read for anyone, it doesn't feel like it caters only to those who have experience reading history, it is simple and easy to understand, but also throws in some very interesting facts I had never heard before!