David Storey

From the Author's Note... To write the biography of Oliver Cromwell is admittedly an ambitious undertaking. In view of the wonderful wealth of material on the subject in existence, to say nothing of the living giants of seventeenth-century research who stalk the land, I hope it may not also seem presumptuous. My aim has however been a different one from that of the scholars from whose works I have derived such benefit. I have wished more simply to rescue the personality of Oliver Cromwell from the obscurity into which it seemed to me that it had fallen, just because there has been such an invaluable concentration on, the political and social trends of the age in which he lived. It is at least possible to claim that Cromwell was the greatest Englishman. In the hopes of explaining to the general reader something of this remarkable man, I have set about my task - as one historian put it to me, half in jest - of “humanizing” Oliver Cromwell.

In a celebration of one of Britain's best-loved, four of Diana Athill's memoirs, spanning the 20th century from her childhood to old age, are now collected in one volume ; Yesterday Morning, Instead of a Letter, Stet, and Somewhere Towards The End.