What a mess of an article. If you're looking for a history of the English civil war that's more easily understandable than the article and genuinely engaging, I can't recommend Mike Duncan's podcast on it enough[1].
It's a review of three books, not a beginners guide to that period. I enjoyed and it made me want to read the books, so I guess it did its job.
It also contains a philosopher related pun which is either one of the best or worst I've ever heard. As great puns should be like that, it's probably the latter.
Yes, I actually intend to read the book in question (with some salt on the side) but I'm waiting until I finish the Wolf Hall books because I don't want any Cromwell spoilers! An absurd situation but there it is.
I rather liked it, but that's not a fair opinion, because way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I did a BA in a nearly adjacent historical area. Not quite going in cold.
> Healey draws from obscurity the mild-mannered polemicist William Walwyn, who wrote pamphlets with such exquisitely delicate titles as (...) “Some Considerations Tending to the Undeceiving of Those, Whose Judgements Are Misinformed.”
This is so good. Today we have "DEBUNKED" in big flashing letters and sounds of horns and crashes. We should produce more considerations to try to undeceive those, whose judgements are misinformed.
This is not a trivial article. It is well researched and very well written until it hits the finale.
To say something like this without blushing:
"The Restoration may have had its glories, but a larger glory belongs to those who groped, for a time, toward something freer and better, and who made us, in particular—Americans, whose Founding Fathers, from Roger Williams to the Quakers, leaped intellectually right out of the English crucible—what we spiritually remain."
If you're going to say something was wrong with it, you should go ahead and say what you think what was wrong with it, rather than leaving it to your readers' imaginations.
1. http://www.sal.wisc.edu/~jwp/revolutions-episode-index.html