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The History Of England has often been compared with Green's Short History.

Like Green, Trevelyan aimed to write a history not of `` English kings or English conquests '', but of the English people.

The result was fortunate.

The History takes too much for granted to serve as a text for other than English schoolboys, and like Britain in the nineteenth century it deteriorates badly as it goes beyond 1870.

Trevelyan's excursions into contemporary history were rarely happy ones.

But as a stimulating, provocative interpretation of the broad sweep of English development it is incomparable.

Living pictures of the early boroughs, country life in Tudor and Stuart times, the impact of the industrial revolution compete with sensitive surveys of language and literature, the common law, parliamentary development.

The strength of the History is also its weakness.

Trevelyan is militantly sure of the superiority of English institutions and character over those of other peoples.

His nationalism was not a new characteristic, but its self-consciousness, even its self-satisfaction, is more obvious in a book that stretches over the long reach of English history.

And yet the elements which capture his liberal and humanistic imagination are those which make the English story worth telling and worth remembering.

Tolerance and compromise, social justice and civil liberty, are today too often in short supply for one to be overly critical of Trevelyan's emphasis on their central place in the English tradition.

Like most major works of synthesis, The History Of England is informed by the positive views of a first-class mind, and this is surely a major work.