Tom Shippey

The notion​ that human history is determined at bottom by natural forces and non-human factors seems to be an idea whose time has come. In Prisoners of Geography (2015), Tim Marshall argued that the fate of nations depends on their rivers and mountains, frontiers and coastlines. In The Earth Transformed (2023), Peter Frankopan added climate to the list: drought in Central Asia caused the...

There​ can be no doubt about the scale of Jonathan Sumption’s achievement in his history of the Hundred Years War. Five massive volumes, published between 1990 and this year, each more than six hundred pages of narrative and notes. Together, they total nearly four thousand pages, not counting the bibliographies, with their ever expanding lists of secondary contributions as well as...

The Viking Age​ is generally agreed to have ended, as far as England was concerned, on 25 September 1066, when Harald Harðráði, or ‘Hardline Harald’, was killed and his army all but annihilated at Stamford Bridge. This put an end to the steady progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark...

With​ his books on (to give only a selection) druids, witches and the ritual year, Ronald Hutton has established himself as a leading authority on paganism. A feature of all his work in this area is the consideration not only of ancient paganism – about which, in the British Isles, we know remarkably little, mostly from archaeology rather than written sources – but also of the...

In​ 1360, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch to us) wrote a letter expressing his puzzlement at a great change that had taken place during his lifetime. In his boyhood, he said, the English ‘were taken to be the meekest of the barbarians … inferior [even] to the wretched Scots’. Now, in his late middle age, ‘they are a fiercely bellicose nation [who] have overturned the...