Book Review: A History of Ancient Britain by Neil Oliver

I've been enjoying Neil Oliver documentaries for many years now, and felt it was time I gave one of his books a go.


The book is set out into 8 chapters, which span pre-history to the Romans. What made this a difficult read is that within the chapters are individual stories, but these stories have no subheadings or even a line space between paragraphs to indicate a start and end point. This means that each chapter, each of which run to around 50 pages, is a solid lump of text. My concentration isn't what it once was, due to illness, so this made the book so inaccessible that I almost abandoned it.

I tried to work around this frustrating presentation by always finishing after the first paragraph on the following page. But this means that I could be in the middle of a story, or one paragraph from the end of it!

The author writes as he speaks, or speaks as he writes, whichever way you wish to look at it! There are two sets of photographic plates, with really good images of relevant places and items - bit these aren't referenced in the book. Additionally, there are no references whatsoever, which would be handy especially as the author often uses recent research. While there is a bibliography, this is organised in alphabetical order by author of the content, so it can take time to find what you're looking for. Because of the layout of the content, it's important that the index is well constructed - and I have to say, I was impressed. Oftentimes indexes are severely lacking, but I found this index to be well constructed and it made it easy to re-find things I wanted to look up.

I did like the content of the book. Oliver often looks at the bigger picture and discusses contemporary events in Europe that impacted and developed the lives of people on our wonderful islands. He also uses the book to reflect on what this all means to him, often becoming quite philosophical - but in an enticing way. While the maps of the television series are not included in the book, the author has a wonderful habit of explaining what old words, particularly place names mean - something that greatly interests me.


Overall, I was disappointed with this book as while it was written well, the content was hard to access. A book that spans such a long time scale is of course going to have large expenses of time between some stories or topics - this is where subheadings come in handy, giving the reader a breather and allowing the content to be taken in and contemplated before delving in to the next section. The book felt unedited and, for me, difficult to follow. This book has a high rating on Goodreads, so it's obviously a popular book. But I really struggled with it, which is annoying considering how much I liked the series it is a companion to.