This is a brief overview of the events leading up to the English Civil War, the wars themselves, the regicide, republic, and restoration.

To be honest, it is too brief, and it's really difficult to see what the point of writing such a small book describing twenty years of tumultuous history might be. There's hardly any detail of the major events; mostly it is about the political and social context for these events. About the only thing that I found informative in this book was Worden's description of the battles for religious supremacy that accompanied the struggle for temporal power during that period.

For people with a real interest in the Civil War, I would recommend reading one of the countless works that deal with them in detail, and I can't really see why anybody else would want to read this at all. ( )

A lot of people from other countries are surprised that most people my age in the UK know little about certain periods of our history. For me one of there periods centres around the wars between the Crown and characters like Oliver Cromwell. I picked to this book as a introduction to this subject with the hope that it would provide an easy to read overview. It does provide an overview but not necessarily an easy read. However, my biggest gripe is that you will need to have previous knowledge of most of the people and the different religious groups involved to get the most out of this. ( )

A short (170pp), very readable summary of the causes, action and short-term consequences of the English civil wars. Much the best introduction for anyone interested in this key period of early modern history. ( )

Very dry and convoluted writing. Better read a summary of the subject matter on Wikipedia! ( )

Solid introduction to the insanity of the twenty years of the English Civil Wars/Interregnum/Revolution - historians can't agree on what to call this period - as constitutional and religious differences caused Parliament to turn on the King and then on itself. Along the way Christmas was suppressed, theatre banned and bishops were abolished. I always knew this was a bloody period of history, but Worden estimates that proportionately more of the population was killed during this conflict than died in WWI. Oh yes and they don't call the period that immediately followed this the Restoration for nothing. Fascinating. ( )