Product Description

This comprehensive A-Z guide to the history of Britain and its peoples will be indispensable reading for general readers and students. It contains some 1400 pages packed full of detail from Hadrian's Wall to Tony Blair.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #405065 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1408 pages

Review
'This marvellous book ... will enlighten, amuse and inform.' - Daily Mail

'This is a super book ... If you were marooned upon that mythical desert island with your discs and only one history book, this would be the one to take.' - Daily Telegraph

From the Back Cover
This comprehensive A-Z guide to the history of Britain and its peoples will be indispensable reading for general readers and students. It contains some 1400 pages packed full of fascinating detail on everything from Hadrian's Wall to the Black Death to Tony Blair. The Companion to British History was assembled over more than thirty years and was first published in 1996 by Longcross Press to great acclaim. The author has comprehensively updated it for the paperback edition.

About the Author
Charles Arnold-Baker is a Barrister-at-Law and was formerly Visiting Professor at the City University. He served in the British Army in World War Two as the Commander of Winston Churchill's bodyguard. He has written and broadcasted widely on history and the law and has been awarded an O.B.E. for his work in local government.

Customer Reviews

Un-put-down-able
What an amazing book this is. It covers British history from 55 B.C. (Caesar's first raid) to 1986, with a few lines to 2000; and it covers this period with about 15,000 entries; a bit like a dictionary. This sounds boring. In fact every time I look up something I get sidetracked and look up completely different subjects; ones eye gets seduced by entries such as Mercia, Vikings, or Surcouf... or Dogger Bank, Choiseul or Marlborough... The style is succinct but seductive, short and to-the-point but obviously written from both deep knowledge and wide interest - something the author can make you feel, too. The entry will often lead on to other entries, and before you know it you've forgotten what your original purpose was. A delight. I almost gave it four stars only because of the paperback version, as I would much prefer a hardback - but this book has given me, a non-historian, so much pleasure already after only a year's use that four would be too few. Five stars it is (but I will keep looking for a hardback version) [Later - found it, and ordered it. Now, who can I give the paperback version to? a brilliant present, this]

Excellent guide
Does everything it claims to, stunningly comprehensive, and giving an excellent introduction to almost any topic from British history. For history students - and I am one - it is essential as a handy reference guide.

The Best Single Volume Historical Reference Work Ever Written
Several things make this book unique. First, it is written by a single author (who took 40 years!) not by a committee. Secondly, the style is both readable and economical; it is unrepetitive; thus it contains much more information than you would expect, even in a book of 1425 pages. Thirdly, the thousands of entries display tremendous variety and yet there is a grand sweep of thought that runs throughout. The author was not born British, and his love of his adoptive country is not uncritical; yet the writer tries to understand the point of view of the people he writes about.

Very good value, considering it is much longer than other more expensive works of this kind.