Lovely, lovely book; one of my favourite books ever. It’s about the English Civil War, and manages to convey information about and the perspective of, both sides pretty fairly, which is rare in books on the subject. Although popular history (and the course of history) tends to be pretty firmly on the Royalist side (well, they did have better clothes and were more fun), Charles I was kind of a fool, and Parliament had a very genuine grievance, and you can learn all about that here, as well as meeting some of the colourful and interesting characters on the Parliamentary side (they weren’t all like Cromwell–not at all).

Simon is one of those nice books where you can learn a great deal painlessly–it’s books like this that consisted my entire pre-university history education, and I was definitely in the top ten as far as what I already knew, in most of my history courses. ( )

Source: here