正文
The Act of Union in 1707, which linked England with Scotland and created the United Kingdom, did not create a federal state with new political institutions separate from and above those of England. Rather it created, in Robert Tombs's words, a pantomime horse, with England providing the front legs, setting the common direction in domestic, foreign and imperial matters, and the back legs following, sometimes reluctantly, along.
1707
年《联合法案》将英格兰和苏格兰连在了一起，造出了联合王国。但是，并没有创立一个新的政治制度与之迥异并高于英格兰政治制度的联邦国家。相反，用罗伯特·托姆斯的话来说就是，这个法案创造了一匹由英格兰充当前后腿的“舞台马”，一边把握着内政外交和帝国事务的大方向，一边又在后面拖后腿，而且还时常不那么心甘情愿。
“The English and Their History” is the perfect starting-point for anyone who wants to grapple with the complexity of the English question. Mr Tombs has marinated himself in the secondary literature. And he writes beautifully; there isn't a lazy sentence in this text. Mr Tombs's achievement is made all the more remarkable by the fact that he is the leading professor of French history at Cambridge: the guy who is supposed to explain the country's troublesome neighbour to England's future rulers rather than decipher the English to themselves and the world.
英格兰问题十分复杂，但如果有人愿意去啃这块硬骨头，《英格兰人及其历史》是个完美的出发点。托姆斯皓首穷经，终成此书。他文笔优美，书中没有一个偷懒的句子。这一成就还因为他是剑桥大学的法国史首席教授而锦上添花。也就是说，作为一个本应向英格兰的未来君主解释他们那个麻烦不断的邻居的伙计，现在反而是在向自己和世界解码英格兰人。
Mr Tombs errs on occasion. He gallops through the Middle Ages and strolls through the Blair years, relying too much on recent historians at the expense of their often wiser predecessors. He is so relentlessly reasonable that you want him sometimes to bare his teeth. But these are minor quibbles compared with his achievement. He not only draws the broad outline of English history with panache, he illustrates it with are markable collection of facts. Who knew that, in the 1880s, the English each used more than 14 pounds of soap a year whereas a French person used only six? Ort hat King George IV had eight boxing champions as pages at his coronation? Or that Friedrich Engels's “Condition of the English Working Class”, which was written in the 1840s, did not come out in English until 1892? He also provides fascinating discussions on what might be termed the art of memory: how the English have interpreted various historic moments—particularly the Norman conquest and the English civil war—and how they have used those moments to construct their national identity.
