Healey’s book is refreshing for its energetic writing, engaging wit and sound foundation in recent historical scholarship. It is light on analysis, but rich with anecdotes and explanations. Narrative sketches take precedence over probing of causes and consequences. Rather than advancing a new interpretation, Healey captures the vitality and turbulence of 17th-century England in an effective retelling, with many more players than the typical cast of kings and queens ... While narrating this tempestuous past, Healey has an eye on the present. He regards key stages in the political and intellectual history of revolutionary England as 'steps on a longer journey' toward modern democracy. Belief in such a trajectory used to be called 'Whiggish.' This readable and informative overview evokes a lost world which, for better or worse, 'was blazing a path toward our own.'
The point of Jonathan Healey’s new book...is to acknowledge all the complexities of the episode but still to see it as a real revolution of political thought—to recapture a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible. Such an account, as Healey recognizes, confronts formidable difficulties ... He writes with pace and fire and an unusually sharp sense of character and humor ... With the eclectic, wide-angle vision of the new social history, Healey shows that ideas and attitudes, rhetoric and revelations, rising from the ground up, can drive social transformation.
Convincing ... A clearsighted narrative of 17th-century England, deftly integrating original and insightful analysis of underlying social phenomena and expressing his enthusiasm in brisk, wryly humorous and occasionally bawdy prose ... Embraces episodes of high drama equal to any associated with the Tudors. There are conspiracies, battles and executions aplenty, plus apocalyptic scourges of pestilence and fire in 1665-66.
