Adventures in Bookland: The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris

Hands down, the best popular account of what it says in the title on the bookshelves today. What makes this so good is Morris’s brilliant balancing of a consideration of the sources with the narrative imperatives of telling the story of what actually happened. That he does this so masterfully is shown by the fact that, until it was over and I was thinking back over it for the purposes of writing a review, I didn’t even realise just how he’d pulled off the hardest trick of writing history: embedding a consideration of the sources in the narrative without stopping the narrative dead in its tracks. Well done, Marc Morris!