82 books like Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Perhaps the finest and least well-known novel to come out of the First World War. Imagist poet Richard Aldington takes his own experiences of the home and Western Fronts and turns both barrels on the sanctimony of Edwardian society and its parade of sycophants, socialites, and fools. Unusually, it is a book by a poet that resists turning war into poetry. Unafraid to use realistically coarse military language, it divided the critics at the time and has divided readers ever since. It is a howl of rage that speaks across the century, a timeless reminder that there is no romance in the needless carnage of war.

If ever there was a book that should be read for all the wrong reasons, then H.E. Marshall’s bizarre children’s book is it. Once a standard text on Edwardian nursery shelves this ‘storybook’ of English history typifies all that is wrong with Britain’s backward-looking, exceptional view of itself. Starting with the tale of how Brutus of Troy tossed some giants off the white cliffs at Dover (yes really!) and ending in 1905, the book sets out an inevitable narrative arc of British top-doggery while plagiarising Shakespeare’s plays and passing them off as history along the way. In any sane country it would be a curiosity but in 2008 it was reprinted by the Civitas think tank and has been promoted by Conservative politicians ever since on that basis that ‘this is the way to teach British history.’ There's a case, set out in my own book, that Marshall did more… show more.

Harry Cole was a criminal who grew up in an East London slum. In 1939 and fresh out of prison he enlisted in the army, before absconding with the mess fund. As France fell, he had a shot at redemption—and having been left behind after the evacuation at Dunkirk, set about organising escape lines. His ability to outwit the enemy made him a star of the various resistance and special operations networks, but shortly after capture in 1941 he began to betray every contact he had made in France.

Murphy’s book is unlike any other wartime biography. It plays out like a gripping piece of fiction. It shows too that while we might comfort ourselves ‘we’ were the good guys in WW2—we had plenty of very bad guys among us. Makes you look at WW2 through a different prism.

This very short book is a miniature masterpiece. Though written in 1976, it is startling in its relevance to our age and times setting out the five principles of stupidity and why they matter. Without ruining the book for you, Cipolla’s central thesis is that ‘stupidity’ exists in the same quantity throughout all tiers of society. So, you have the same degree of stupid authors as stupid barristers, doctors, tree surgeons, and plumbers and that this is unfortunate because: “a stupid person is the most dangerous kind of person.” Ultimately the book explains why, throughout history, we have elevated stupid people to fame and power. And boy isn’t it necessary to understand that one in our age.

This is the basic text. You can’t study early Christian Anglo-Saxon England without Bede’s Ecclesiastical History – and why would you want to?

Bede’s History was an instant classic, popular from the moment it was published. Bede’s scholarship and clear prose – as well as his eye for detail, chronology, and a good story – mean this book will always be engaging, intriguing, and relevant.

The version recommended here is an updated translation including an Introduction to get you going with the History, together with some other helpful texts – especially Bede’s Letter to Ecgberht, which is vital for grasping the context in which Bede completed his magnum opus.

This book is the best introduction there is to early Christian Anglo-Saxon England.

Mayr-Harting is an excellent scholar and a beautiful writer – in addition to being a superb lecturer and, indeed, an incredibly kind and generous human being. All of these qualities shine through in this wonderful book, which repays frequent reading – even by established academics.

Mayr-Harting’s treatment of sources is sensitive, and his commentary is always perceptive. This volume provides both narrative and some analysis, giving not only a general overview but also an introduction to the key people and issues that will take readers’ understanding of – and appreciation for – the period far beyond the preliminary.

Although the faith has a history of nearly two centuries in the New World, to this day, there are only a handful of books about Orthodox Christianity in North America.

Among them, this is an easy-to-read monograph that offers a narrative of the faith’s history in the New World, going all the way back to the first Alaskan communities and later on to the institution of ethnic churches in the 19th and 20th century US.

The author offers a succinct overview of the important developments within various US-based ethnic communities and of 21st-century challenges. It is highly recommended because of the depth and breadth of its coverage.

Nietzsche said “God is dead, but in thousands of years there still may be caves where his shadow will be shown.” Tom Holland traces the effect of the long shadow on our lives.

This Pulitzer prize-winning history, thoroughly researched and engagingly written, is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the history of American evangelicalism. While it now defines the religious right, evangelicalism has espoused different religious and political positions from its eighteenth-century founding to the present, as Fitzgerald thoroughly documents. Initially, a populist rejection of established churches, in the nineteenth-century evangelicals split over the issue of slavery; Southern evangelicals insisted that the Bible endorsed it. In the twentieth century, evangelicals separated from fundamentalists and became more politically engaged as American business interests used religion to wrest evangelicals from the Democratic Party and political conservatives identified abortion as the issue most likely to galvanize them.

Since the 1980s evangelicals have become a dependable voting bloc for the Republican Party, but Fitzgerald concludes, younger evangelicals are more open and concerned with climate change and gender equality. There is no book I can recommend… show more.

Bangs is the dean of Pilgrim history. Strangers and Pilgrims is a hard-to-find book these days, but if you want to go far deeper than most portraits of the Pilgrims do, it’s worth the search. Bangs focuses on the experience of the separatist Pilgrims in the Dutch city of Leiden (many of the Pilgrims went there around 1608, before traveling on the Mayflower in 1620) and shows how those years in the Dutch Republic shaped what followed. This is a richly illustrated, carefully researched, and cogent analysis of English separatists who made new lives for themselves in a strange land not just once, but twice.