Dr Johnson gave as an example of the strangeness of English history Charles I's concessions to Parliament. ‘Related nakedly,’ he said, ‘without detail of circumstances, they would not have been believed.’ Anyone can test this for himself by reading the naked narration in Thomas Hobbes's Behemoth. What is wanted is not simply ‘corroborative detail’ but what the Doctor called ‘preparation for introducing the different events’: in other words, time, and space, and big books. ‘Short Histories’, more especially when they are intended to serve as text-books, produce incredulity. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is the enemy of historical truth, and—as Johnson concluded: ‘Truth, sir, is of the greatest value in these things.’

A Frenchman has described the history of England as one of mankind's outstanding successes. If only for that reason it is peculiarly ill adapted to the demands of brevity. Success takes a lot of explaining and, perhaps, when it is over, excusing. Unless, of course, it be simply accounted to providential favour, which is a form of cheating on a scarcely less enormous scale than those ancient alibis which relied upon Divine chastisement for the destruction of empires from St Augustine to Bossuet.