Investigations of a Dog

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics. (more…)

Whatever you do don’t ever get yourself a reputation for writing snarky blog posts about dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell. If you do, people will start giving you other dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell in the hope that you’ll write something funny about them. Which is how I acquired the novelization of the film Cromwell (while searching for that link I found that there’s also a 2008 film called Cromwell that’s about a serial killer and a stripper!). If you’re at all interested in the English Civil War you’ve probably seen the film. I haven’t seen it for a long time but I assume that the structure of the book is quite close to the film (ie bears very little relation to anything historians have ever written, but doesn’t make much sense as a film plot either). Dipping into it at random throws up all kinds of weird things, like John Hampden and Thomas Hammond seem to have been conflated into the same character for no reason other than having some of the same letters in their surnames. But there are some things that are unique to the book. First of all, you’ve got to love the cover:

Is this a historical novel or a heavy metal album? Why hasn’t the image of a fist defiantly holding up a lobster helmet been more widely used on the covers of history books? It’s much more exciting than some of the usual clichés.

Then there’s the style of writing. In the opening scene, Arthur Bates has tried very hard to avoid the usual novelization trap of just tacking “he said” onto every line of the script:

A pair of horsemen made their way slowly across the bleak, lifeless fens of Cambridgeshire, their heads bent against the biting wind that was piling masses of dark clouds in the sky above them. Nothing else in that wintry landscape moved; it was as though the world had paused to gird itself against the onslaught of the bitter season, and even the old Norman church that loomed in the distance seemed to be hunching its shoulders against the wind.

Bates also has the kind of obsession with people’s ages that you normally only find in local newspapers: “Henry Ireton, a lean, keen-eyed young man of 29”; “His [John Pym] 56-year old eyes were blurred and made watery by the relentless wind”; “A pretty, dark-haired girl of 16 [Bridgett Cromwell] looked up from across the room”. He’d probably be very bad at telling the 28-years-old joke: “A 28 year old man strode across the desolate fens, vigorously doing something you would never expect a 28 year old man to do on the desolate fens…”.

Overall this is probably a bit more sensible than the Ladybird book – Arthur Bates at least knows that women have names and that Cromwell didn’t live in Lincolnshire – but somehow I miss the monkey, and the sheer insanity of L. du Garde Peach. It was said that his “only virtue was speed”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if speed was also his main inspiration. I can imagine him knocking out a Ladybird book in one long, frantic night, fuelled by purple hearts and a bottle of gin.

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish. (more…)

Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.

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Michael Howard, Liberation Or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century, (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2007; ISBN: 9781847251596).

Before I start this review I have to point out a couple of things. This is the first time that I’ve been sent a review copy of a book rather than reviewing something that I’ve bought myself. For some bloggers this situation is an ethical dilemma, but I’ve had enough experience of PR from the other side (the thankless task of sending CDs to fanzines who ignore you or slag you off) that I wouldn’t hesitate to kick the author and publisher in the teeth if I thought that the book was a load of rubbish. I know that I’m doing them a favour even by mentioning the book on a highly Google ranked blog, and that no review is ever so bad that you can’t get a good selective quote out of it.

Second, this book is by Michael Howard the eminent military historian and founder of the War Studies department at Kings College London, not Michael Howard the former Tory leader.

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I’ve just read two of the most important recent books on the First World War: Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (ISBN: 0747264600), and Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory (ISBN: 1852855126). This post is somewhere between a review and a collection of random thoughts on these books and the First World War in general. It will also allow me to use the word “metanarrative”, which I seem to have been neglecting lately.

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Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

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Beginning Shakespeare (2005; ISBN: 0719064236) is a brief and accessible introduction to Shakespeare criticism aimed at first year undergraduates. I had high hopes for it because it’s in the same series as Peter Barry’s excellent Beginning Theory (2002; ISBN: 0719062683), which I found very useful and informative despite (or perhaps because of) it being written for first year English Literature undergraduates. Beginning Shakespeare turned out to be not quite as good. Although I got some valuable things out of it, there are some shortcomings which can’t all be explained away by it being a basic introduction for 18 year olds.

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