England: The Autobiography
edited by John Lewis-Stempel
Viking, $270
There can be few books in which Julius Caesar figures alongside Johnny Rotten. 'All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue colour, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and the lip,' the Roman emperor wrote of the people he found on the damp island he sailed to in 55BC. He failed to conquer England (it was left to Claudius almost a decade later to complete the task). But he provided the first direct written record of events in the country, two extracts of which open this collection.
At the other end of the book, punk rocker Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon), another Briton outsiders might have found oddly attired, holds forth on why his musically challenged band the Sex Pistols provoked such outrage in the uptight England of the mid-1970s. In between we have, as the book's sub-title puts it, '2,000 years of English history by those who saw it happen'. John Lewis-Stempel has previously gathered first-hand accounts for insider views of the D-Day landings in northern France and fatherhood. Here, he turns his attention to the history of England as seen by those who made it and those who saw it.
As national histories go, England's is a crowded one. Its democracy has been copied across the globe, it was the engine of the industrial revolution, the centre of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen, and a plucky defender of liberty against a Nazi Germany that had usurped most of Europe.