I think we’ve come to your final history of food book recommendation. This is The English Housewife by Gervase Markham, dating from 1615. To be clear, I’m not saying I think this is foolish! I disagree with many things that are NOT stupid, and I am not all-knowing. Today Neil talks with Brigitte Webster about her new book Eating with the Tudors which has just been published by Pen & Sword History. Diane Purkiss is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford and fellow of Keble College. She is the author of the much-admired The Witch in History, Troublesome Things, and the acclaimed history, The English Civil War.

Roundabouts and Roundheads | Books | The Guardian

Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. The reality is if there is anything about this arrangement that we have now not debated, thrashed to death, I’d love to know what it is.”I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven. He is also talking at Chelsea History Festival on Friday 29 September 2023, at 6pm about the history of sugar: https://chelseahistoryfestival.com/ I presume the days of Polish expansion to which you refer preceded the 18th century and the rise of Russia, or perhaps you refer to the brief war with Russia in 1921(?); anyway I am no expert on Polish history… I find the narrowness of individual ‘subjects’ defeating. You bring more to reading poetry, I think, if you have a strong sense of what they are likely to have had for dinner. We mustn’t underestimate the shaping power of what we eat. I’ve been doing some work recently on the English at sea, and thinking about scurvy. The effects of scurvy on the mindset of entire naval armadas is almost impossible to overestimate. That’s the remarkable thing. People were literally dying in droves of a disease that nobody fully understood right up to polar exploration. Given that, I can see that, if one were an ambitious 17th-century merchant, say, it would be very important to have a capable wife running the show at home.

Professor Diane Purkiss | Faculty of English

An absolute gem… English Food is a fabulous read. I devoured it with gusto… My review copy will find a permanent place on my bookshelves… a richly entertaining and enlightening social history of England… Superb” - Sunday Times, Christopher Hart Purkiss was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and was educated at Roseville College, Our Lady of the Rosary Convent, and Stuartholme School. She received a BA with first class Honours from the University of Queensland and D.Phil. from Merton College, Oxford. She became lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia in 1991, and lecturer in English at the University of Reading in 1993. In 1998 she became Professor of English at Exeter University, before taking up her current post at Keble College in 2000. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Let’s have a look at these food history books that you’ve selected, starting with The Kitchen in History by Molly Harrison. Could you give us an overview, and why you think it’s worth reading? When published, Neil’s blog post with a recipe for sago pudding, will be found at www.britishfoodhistory.com Their interests have not been trivialized, vast amount of money is transferred to the Left Behind areas from London (mostly) and SE England. Yes agreed. Sadly Johnson has massively let us down and the Tories would be toast if only there was a less worse option.