God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars
By Michael Braddick
Allen Lane £30, 758 pages
FT bookshop price: £24

It is fiendishly difficult for academic historians to write for the general public. A scholarly book becomes a general one, academics tend to imagine, by adding a few explanations. Tell the public what the Grand Remonstrance is, then motor on exactly as you would write for the academic journal Past and Present. But good popular history, of course, needs more than explanations. It requires a personal touch – narrative drive, graceful prose. We need to care about John Pym and Charles I. Yet if the hapless academic does manage to provide these excitements, he runs the risk of appearing vulgar to his colleagues.