The Civil Wars 1637-1653

Pitched at exactly the right level for me - wanting to find out just the facts and the big picture without too much analysis. In fact in this 100-page book Bennett manages to pack so much into each paragraph the experience is like getting a series of compressed knowledge parcels - which expand inside the head releasing the info. Or like having a whole 16 year chunk of history downloaded a la matrix. The period covered sounds like an exciting time when orthodoxies are up for challenge and being fervently and violently disputed right across the spectrum of thought from ultra-conservative to ultra-radical. As usual the victorious ideas are not those that give the best outcome for the largest number of people, but those that can muster the most military resources. An old marxist like myself would say that the exclusion of the levellers (and the liquidation of the diggers) doomed the whole English revolution, because at that point it resolved into a bourgeois revolution where the victors were simply a new privileged class supplanting the old. Or is that too presumptuous an analysis? After all I've only read 100 pages on the whole subject.