History of England in 25 Poems

Catherine Clarke is a Professor at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and Director of the Victoria County History of England. She was previously Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton, where she remains a Visiting Professor.

This is a marvellous idea, quite brilliantly realised. Catherine Clarke takes 25 poems, from Caedmon’s Hymn and The Battle of Maldon to Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop and Geoffrey Hill’s September Song, and uses them as windows into the English past, from politics and plagues to nature and nostalgia. Her book is a winning blend of jolly ballads and melancholy reflections, alive to the ways in which the meanings of England and Englishness are never fixed, always changing