There are a few minor wobbles in the chapter entitled "War", which covers the 1640s. Worden has incorporated much of the latest research on the period, but the starring role he accords the parliamentarian MP John Pym gives his narrative for the early 1640s a curiously dated feel. Once seen as the first guiding genius of the parliamentarian cause, "King Pym" has emerged from recent work more as a party bag-man than a lofty statesman.

Worden is particularly strong on the human cost of the wars - the mud, misery and material devastation. Yet as so often when non-military historians venture into a warzone they can look vulnerable. It is easy to assume that the five armies (two royalist, three parliamentarian) that fought at Marston Moor in 1644 constituted "maybe the largest gathering of men that had ever met on English soil". But that dubious distinction probably goes to the far bloodier battle at Towton during the Wars of the Roses. Fresh from 100 years of slaughtering the French, they knew how to fight then.

It is when the book moves into the 1650s that Worden really hits full stride. He has made the unstable post-regicidal regimes and their literary colossi - John Milton, Andrew Marvell and England's first great journalist Marchamont Nedham - very much his own, and his expertise shows to brilliant effect here. There is some subtle but effective point-scoring in his argument that republicanism was more the product than the cause of the king's demise. And his account of the regicide itself challenges the old assumption that the king was doomed even before his trial began.