Narrative of Britain

Norman Keep in Cardiff Castle

I find a good book drastically enhances travel: While in Wales, I perused Winston Churchill’s Birth of Britain, a study well suited to the Welsh Marches and their important role in creating and defining British politics and society.

Sometimes it is hard to connect with the long-forgotten dead: their passions, their joys, their hatreds. It is all so foreign, so distant, so gone… gone beyond memory or reclaim.

Parents of Henry VII (Cardiff Castle)

Churchill, however, in his history, took the individual narratives of the places I visited and wove them into the fabric of British history, fixing people and places into the British narrative, and almost, as it were, making them come alive again.

Aside: One thing in particular stood out. Churchill quotes an English historian who, noting that far more criminals were hanged every year in England than in France, argued that it demonstrated the guts and courage of the English, because they were brave enough to steal unlike the French.