What an extraordinary historian Ronald Hutton is. He is justly celebrated as the author of two books on popular customs and the cycle of the ritual year, a wide-ranging description of prehistoric Britain and a lively book on witches.
Now he returns to his original stamping ground of 17th-century England with The Making of Oliver Cromwell, an exploration of one of the most written-about historical figures of all. Why add to the plethora of lives about him? Well, as Hutton suggests, the more that is written about Cromwell, the more he seems, somehow, to elude historians.
