Terrific primer of who did what, when and to whom for an inexplicably underrepresented period of British history.

You would think the years 1640-1660 would be a perma-fixture on school curriculums and pulse through the collective cultural consciousness. After all the story has everything – a despotic King, impassioned parliamentary debate, a truly uncivil Civil War, the world turned upside down, religious radicalism, regicide and power’s corruptive influence on a country sliding into dictatorship. Then from the ashes of said dictatorship, reinstatement of the monarchy and, if you run the film onto 1688, bloody revenge by a useless King leading to said useless King hopping it on a moonlight flit, while a foreign royal family swans in at the request of, well, everyone. Oh and a legacy of representative parliamentary democracy that has lasted 400 years.

Yet  for some reason the English Civil Wars do not hold this prominent place in the popular imagination. The only recent example I can think of is Peter Flannery’s ambitious but ultimately flawed The Devil’s Whore on Channel 4 a couple of years ago. Blair Worden’s excellent book explains why this might be. This is not, despite victory for the forces of “democracy”, a simple story of goodies and baddies. Baddies there are aplenty, but it becomes harder and harder to spot the goodies the longer it goes on. The austerity of the latter day Parliamentarians compared to the dash of the King’s cavaliers may be against English tastes, yet Blair Worden shows this too to be a mere cariacature. For this was a Civil War with unclear geographical lines, unclear class divisions and no clear roundhead v cavalier split.

This is a muddy, messy story of failure with an unclear legacy. Worden does a great job clearing a little of the mess revealing what is at times a thrilling chronology without trying to over personalise events.  So instead of Simon Schama we have a Brodie’s Notes version of history that is, like the lives of many of its subjects, nasty, brutal and short.

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