The Culture of the English People

• The Culture of the English People: Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution
  N.J. G. Pounds - Cambridge University Press, 1994 - 478 pp. - £50 hb, £17.95 pb

This is a brave and valuable book; the outcome of a long and successful career working at its subject matter and expounding it. It provides in judicious, quite readable form just that which the reader of history, and to a considerable extent the writer of it, needs to know as cultural 'background' to her chosen topic or his, where the word 'background' should be held to slough off its faintly patronising garb. Knowledge of English culture, material, intellectual and aesthetic is necessary far beyond that which the cultivated speaker of our language has to be informed of. Politicians, administrators, scientists, even business executives and engineers all over the world want to know about it, or ought to want to.