A Radical History of Britain
By Edward Vallance
Little, Brown £25, 656 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Beware exciting titles. Anyone turning to Edward Vallance’s book expecting a dramatic reworking of textbook British history will be disappointed. This isn’t a radical history but rather a history of British radicalism, a scholarly look at dissent stretching from Alfred the Great to the Iraq war, via the Peterloo massacre and the suffragette movement.

Vallance’s revisionism is aimed at our ideas of what our radical ancestors stood for and achieved. How has the Magna Carta become such a “talisman of British liberty” when the rights it guarantees us are so meagre – and when it can be claimed as their own by both Billy Bragg and the British National party? How have the Levellers and the Diggers become such revolutionary heroes when, for centuries, they were all but forgotten? Vallance’s conclusion is that, though radicalism usually fails in the short term, it is an essential part of the British story.