The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story
Jessie Childs
Bodley Head, £25, 336 pages
For a place that witnessed the longest and bloodiest siege of the English Civil War, the ruined Basing House in Hampshire is a curiously bland and unsuggestive site. Only the most fertile historical imagination can conjure from its surviving ditches, mounds and walls any sense of the building’s now-vanished size or splendour; still less any understanding of why so many thousands fought and died for its possession.
