The History of England

Joseph Turner lived in the 19th century. He was a famous English painter. His paintings were a great success. He was fond of dogs. One day his dog which he loved very much broke a leg.

Robert Burns, the great Scottish poet, loved common people and wrote for them. Though he had little formal education, he was well-read and talented. He began to be recognized as a poet when his first poems were published in 1786. He was known as a very witty man.

Many years ago tea was unknown in European countries. Many people didn’t even know the word tea, though drinking tea was very popular in the East.
Once a young sailor came back from India. He was the only son of an old woman and every time he returned to Great Britain from a far-away country he [...]

Great Britain is the term used for the island containing the contiguous principalities of England, Scotland and Wales. Great Britain is used to distinguish Britain from Brittania Minor, or Brittany, in France. The term Great Britain was officially used only after King James I (who was also James VI of Scotland) acceded to the throne [...]

Almost every nation has a reputation of some kind. The French are supposed to be amorous, gay, fond of cham­pagne. The Germans are usually considered as dull, formal, efficient, fond of military uniforms and parades; the Ameri­cans boastful, energetic, gregarious and vulgar. The British are reputed to be cold, reserved, rather haughty people. They are [...]

In 1960’s Britain experienced a real revolution in fashion. This was a rebellion against the existing con­ventions in dress, social behaviour, music, popular en­tertainment, and so on. London became a world cap­ital of popular music, and the groups like “The Beatles” made British music popular all over the world.

During the last decades the people of Great Brit­ain stopped to be purely “European”. Most of the coun­try’s population descend from the Celts, Angles, Sax­ons, and Normans. Since the 1950’s, however, many immigrants from Commonwealth countries have set­tled in Great Britain, especially in England. In the mid-195 O’s immigrants arrived at a rate of about [...]

The general election of 1945 gave the Labour par­ty led by Clement Attlee for the first time a majority of the popular vote and an overwhelming parliamen­tary majority. The result was less a rebuke of Churchill’s wartime leadership than an expression of approval of the party’s role in the war, and of hope that it [...]

Without a declaration of war, Germany opened an offensive against Poland on 1 September 1939. The Allies, Britain and France, stood helplessly by while Poland suffered the full force of the German “blitz­krieg” — lightning war. The preparedness of the Ger­man airforce allowed it to carry out simultaneous bomb­ing of military depots and air bases, [...]

The reign thus thrust upon George VI was to be one of the most momentous in the history of Britain. The immediate preoccupations were with Foreign Pol­icy. Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937 and, faced by a new and sinister line-up, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo “Axis”, did his best to appease its mem­bers’ power hunger. Hitler’s [...]