Key points from this review of The Restless Republic by Anna Keay: 1. Very few people tuck very neatly into one historical ‘age’ or another” — one only has to

Key points from this review of The Restless Republic by Anna Keay: 1. Very few people tuck very neatly into one historical ‘age’ or another” — one only has to trace the successful early careers of Restoration figures such as Pepys and Christopher Wren back into the 1650s to appreciate this 2. What may be a casual observation about other periods of history is of tremendous importance in understanding the Interregnum, which was consigned to official oblivion the moment the restored Charles II post-dated the start of his reign to his father’s death 3. Far from the dour, militaristic regimes of popular imagination, life under the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate emerges as innovative and exciting: the effect of the hitherto unimaginable act of abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords after years of transformative conflict being to unleash an energetic spirit of ambitious experimentation and industry 4. The complicated Civil Wars of the 1640s, and the 11 years of constitutional experiments that followed, have struggled to capture the attention of a wider public living happily on a diet of Hitler and the Tudors and content with Britain’s neat national story of kings and queens stretching along the schoolchild’s wooden ruler 5. But what is more striking is the strong current of forgiveness and future-proofing civility from all sides: the Parliamentarians were “remarkably unvindictive” in government, as was Charles II on his return