You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. What helps set great historical fiction apart from the average is the little details of everyday life and, probably the most important aspect, credible dialogue. Blubb sent for Adam and along with the two bothers who drove the freight, they fought and killed two of the men trying to steal the weapons belonging to the government. One may not believe every surprising episode in “God Is an Eng lishman,” but one learns to be lieve in Adam and Henrietta. in parts it functioned like a leadership book, in that it teaches how to empower and motivate people to do good work.

As an army officer, he witnessed devastation to the civilian populations of the Crimea and India, which is a major reason why he decides to quit the army.Then there is a third strand – an elegant, potted social and cultural history of 1980s and 1990s Britain, told in the broad, sweeping manner of a prime-time BBC television history series, presented by an off-duty newscaster, full of wonderfully evocative (for those of a similar generation) references to Bucks Fizz records and Morecambe and Wise catchphrases.

I knocked off a star because I have trouble relating to Adam's driving ambition to make his name in the business world. And he is determined to win the beautiful, strong-minded Henrietta, and persuade her to share in his struggles and triumphs. One spring afternoon following a heated exchange with a pupil, Sebastian Sermon, a forty-nine-year-old schoolmaster, experiences a brainstorm. And yet the prescience was there, formless but real, and once it had appeared uninvited and unwelcome, it remained, a silent, brooding wraith standing a yard or two behind his right shoulder, refusing to go and yet refusing to leave cover and identify itself as anything more than a shade. He was editor of The Bulletin, The Observer, and Quadrant, and was best known for his 1964 book The Lucky Country.

I loved, loved, loved that this was set in Victorian England and didn’t just focus on London, but the entire country, and more so that specific issues are highlighted and addressed.

The average Brit was in fact a relative of a peasant who had been tossed by need into the provincial towns or London, just like so many ’internal immigrants’ who arrived in Catalonia from (other) parts of rural Spain in the 1950s and ‘60s. DeMille style of book -- sweeping in its scope and diligent in its details of the lives of a whole cast of people: Henrietta's father and his mileau, All the employees of Swann-on-Wheels, the neighbors of the home the Swanns eventually bought, etc. Had his book about the state of religion in England given way to a treatise on the true nature of morality and the human struggle, central to all faiths, to love one's neighbour? Filled with epic scenes and memorable characters God is an Englishman triumphs in its portrayal of human strength and weakness, and in its revelations of the power of love.He can make you laugh out loud, and generates a momentum that has you turning the pages wanting it never to end. There is a big age gap between them, so Henrietta has a lot of growing to do in the novel to become an adult.