Allez, poltroon!

Peter Popham
02 August 2025, The Tablet

Rocky start: Charles and Henrietta Maria

Alamy

The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 JONATHAN HEALEY (BLOOMSBURY, 432 PP, £25) Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

The young historian Jonathan Healey has a sure compass. His previous book, The Blazing World, was a canter through the seventeenth century, during which the mists of antiquity parted and a recognisably modern Britain emerged. Now, in The Blood in Winter, he trains his gaze on the weeks and months when that modernity, as represented by Parliament, donned armour and prepared to battle it out with the forces of reaction

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