The beginning, middle and end of England

HISTORY: A Short History of EnglandBy Simon Jenkins, Profile Books. 320pp. £25

ACCORDING TO PIERRE NORA, the celebrated analyst of historical memory, in the late 19th century the nation was given a grand narrative, turned into an absorbing family saga, with its “highs and lows, its great moments and its ordeals, its inexhaustible repertoire of personalities, scenes, lives, intrigues, dates, good and bad people”. Nora has also traced how this approach has been disaggregated, broken down, thematised in the postmodern age: often with exciting results but sometimes producing a kind of bite-sized and decontextualised mishmash. The results in the classroom and lecture hall have not been universally happy, provoking calls for a “revival of narrative”.

Accordingly, Simon Jenkins has boldly written a unitary, continuous text, taking "England" as his subject. The boldness should not surprise us. He is a stellar public intellectual and the best newspaper columnist in the business: the wit, dazzle and scornful elan of his weekly Guardianpieces make them required reading (though they must sometimes infuriate the paper's core readership). His columns have always shown an impatience with those who don't learn from history: in excoriating the architects of the financial crash, or policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, he adroitly deploys parallels with the South Sea Bubble and Victorian imperial adventures, and some brilliantly prescient pieces on the current coalition government demonstrated that Nick Clegg has not learned from Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. This penchant for connecting past to present characterises this book – though the huge challenge of packing in the centuries from 410 to 2011 allows for less of it than one might wish.

A Short History of Englandis intermittently enlivened by his passion for political analysis; the approach also reflects his architectural bent, as chairman of the National Trust and author of several invigorating surveys of houses and churches. The illustrations are lavish, and the breakneck narrative interrupted to indicate the priest-concealing features of a recusant dwelling, the country-house style camouflaging 19th-century mill buildings, or the art-deco factories along Western Avenue in London. But principally the story is of the rulers of England, as Angevins, Plantagenets and Tudors give way to Whigs, Tories and Labourites. Along the way the "consent to power" is bargained by powerful interest groups within the realm, a process invariably dominated by the need of a ruler for money. Social history is sometimes sprinkled on for flavouring, but there are no equivalents of Macaulay's celebrated third chapter, giving a bird-eye view of England in 1688.

Macaulay and his descendant GM Trevelyan do come to mind, though, as the organising theme of the story concerns the development and powers of parliament; all comes back to Magna Carta, and runs forward to it as well (the book ends unabashedly with Kipling’s poem on the subject). Other emphases are similarly robust, and conventional, such as the Englishness of English Protestantism: recent interpretations prioritising an underground Catholic identity are not entertained. Individual heroes are hard to discern, but they appear to be Peel and Disraeli rather than Gladstone and Lloyd George (Thatcher is credited with being both Peelite and Disraelian). There is room for a certain amount of revisionism about the second World War and the way it has been spun, and the bombing of civilian targets is condemned, but the “finest hour” thesis is essentially, and correctly, endorsed.

What about England’s less fine moments? Setting the boundaries east of the Black Mountains and the Irish Sea, and south of the Tweed, necessarily avoids many of them. Jenkins argues firmly that a history of “England” is needed because that country is coming back into focus as its Celtic empire breaks away through devolution. Though his journalism can be violently funny about Scots and Welsh nationalism (especially from the point of view of a Welshman), he here accepts those regions’ return to some kind of separate status, and expects Northern Ireland to follow them. Therefore, Ireland remains marginal. The idea of a subordinate Plantagenet kingdom there is not dealt with, the 17th-century civil war is “English” rather than a “War of the Three Kingdoms”, the 1798 Rising does not figure in the background to the Act of Union, and the seismic effect of Gladstone’s conversion to home rule is underplayed. (Where Ireland does enter the picture, there are some slips: what happened at the Curragh Camp in 1914 was not a mutiny, and the RIC was neither “British” nor generically Protestant.) The wider empire is also kept at a certain distance, and its dispersal is dealt with crisply and economically.

Devotees of Jenkins's writing will recognise a couple of idees fixes. One is a cold eye cast on foreign adventures; another is a doughty defence of localism against centralisation, which dominates the final chapters, reviving a Norman-versus-Saxon trope. (Thatcher is, unsurprisingly, a Norman.) The final chapters return to the themes suggested by the title of one of his previous books: Thatcher&Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts.

Early on, Jenkins isolates as one of the governing themes of English history “a genius for opportunistic social change”, and he generally makes the claim good. But his emphasis leaves little room for discussing how English history (unlike that of the Celtic fringe) constructs, exploits and sustains the complex business of class, and the ways in which this has acted as a restrictive factor in historical development as well as a bulwark of social stability. “Some are more equal than others”: that quintessential Englishman George Orwell’s quip remains as applicable to the country of Blair and Cameron as to the Animal Farm of Napoleon and Snowball.

Roy Foster is Carroll professor of Irish history at Oxford University. His most recent book, Words Alone: Yeats His Inheritances,was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press