There's always trepidation when a new book review of something you slaved over for years pings into your inbox. Especially when the reviewer, in my case, is someone as illustrious as Professor Andrew Lambert of King's College London.
But how nice when it's a good one. This is a particularly gratifying one, too, as my Britain and the Sea since 1600 has been selected by Lambert as one of BBC History Magazine's eighteen books of 2010.
Professor Lambert very nicely says:
[This book] addresses a great gap in historical imagination: the inability to place the interaction between people, nation and ocean in broad terms, rather than the narrow specialist approaches that dominate maritime history... It should be impossible to study the British Isles without acknowledging the all-embracing sea. Yet many have written as if it were a less mountainous version of Switzerland.
Let's hope the good reviews keep rolling in! I was actually wondering why it had started to attract more interest - now I know...
