Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer and novelist who has always been fascinated with the culture and history of the city of London. Peter Ackroyd, who I have always thought of as a novelist, has probably written about as many nonfiction books as he has novels. In the end Stephen names Matilda’s son Henry II(1133-1189) to be his successor which puts my direct line of ancestors back in power. I was prompted to read this book after reading the author's version of the Canterbury Tales, and I'm pleased I did. The Stuart dynasty was responsible for bringing together Scotland and England into one realm even if the union has always been marked by political divisions.

The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. Peter Ackroyd has always been interested in London and “London: The Biography” which is one of his most popular works is a thorough and extensive discussion of the city over the ages. This truly inclusive work of history, the second of Ackroyd's History of England series, provides a close look at the evolution of England from an insular feudal country of parts to a nation ready to participate in the greater world on its own terms at the end of the 16th century.Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. Still, the 20th century is certainly enough of a subject, and witnessed the utter transformation of England. Elizabeth I is the great one, Henry is the great scary ogre one, Edward is the one who dies young so we really don’t want to say anything either way, and Mary is Bloody, but we might feel a little sorry for her (maybe, just a little). Having not read volume 1 of this series, I was surprised that this begins with the coronation of Henry VIII, but the author has perhaps treated his father as being the last monarch of the medieval age. He just happened to be in the way of one of the most ambitious and best field commanders of the day William the Conqueror.

Hugh Dalton is ‘of vampiric appearance, loyal soul, brilliant mind and disastrous naivety’ — a summary which hardly begins to suggest how many people loathed him.

A boy who says, “the Lady Mary has the better title” has his ears “severed at the root on the following morning. The title was inspired by “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” by TS Elliot that was first published in 1948.

He takes his readers from the construction of Stonehenge to the establishment of cathedrals and common law, which were two of the great glories of medieval England. But he also gives us a vivid sense of how England's early people lived: the homes they built, the clothes the wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. Whatever happens will be for the worse,” the Tory prime minister would say, “and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible. The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. Thanks to him, “within three years the monasteries, the friaries, the priories and the nunneries would be gone.Their faith under Henry and Elizabeth, but the numbers don’t hold up b/c Mary reigned for a scant five years compared to Elizabeth’s 45 years and Henry’s 39+. In just a few pages, Ackroyd manages to bring together all the overarching themes of the period, and set the stage for the next instalment. Overall, this book makes one pity the Tudors for the private misery they suffered as a result of their ambitions and power. Ackroyd said, "I think William Blake is the most powerful and most significant philosopher or thinker in the course of English history.

One I particularly liked, and so did he, obviously, because he refers to it at least twice, is that the measurement of the yard (0. Nevertheless, I did not enjoy Tudors to the same degree as I did the first volume, because Ackroyd jumps right into the action with his initial chapter instead of explaining his approach to the topic, his selection of data and his focus. He traces the slow transformation of a country from one where the churches once were looked to for "good governance" to one in which "the state" as a governmental body slowly began to evolve. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J.Ackroyd then worked for four years at “The Spectator” magazine where he would rise through the ranks until he became managing editor. It is very odd to claim that ‘the BBC [during the Falklands War] was not always a friend to Thatcher, but here, perhaps for the last time, she found in it an ally’. At best, they are a useful framework — I mean, who doesn’t mentally place events of the past against the dates of rulers, thinking of Victorian and Edwardian architects as subtly different in some way? We do start to get a sense of England as it develops, slowly, usually through inconsequential turns of events and chance occurrences but it's far from the main focus.