Worden takes nothing for granted. The civil war was not inevitable. Neither were the parliamentarian victories of 1645 and 1648, nor the king's execution. This sensitivity to the contingency of events makes for compelling reading. What if Cromwell had accepted the crown when it was offered to him in 1657, asks Worden, and then lived long enough to see off his republican opponents? Would there have been a kingly line of Cromwells stretching into the 18th century? Would there still be this strange notion of Cromwell the crusader for democracy (a dirty word at the time) - a myth that Worden happily debunks?

The last chapter, "Restoration", is magisterial - although surprisingly for an historian of political culture, Worden concludes that perhaps the most lasting impact of the wars was not in the realm of ideas or politics but in government finances. At the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Parliamentarians may have lost the political war, but they had turned Charles I's "spaniel-fawning" state into a Leviathan - a tax-raising, war-fighting monster. This was perhaps the wars' greatest legacy.

Which brings us back to our present stricken banking system, for it was the wars that prepared the ground for the 1690s' financial revolution, at the heart of which lay the establishment of the Bank of England. The money generated by this revolution built the army and navy that made Britain a world power. Worden's fine book parleys these momentous developments with style and authority. The civil wars may no longer appear recognisably "modern", and yet that foreign country of 360 years ago, racked by doubt in politicians and traditional institutions, still looks strangely familiar.