The Kentish rebellion

The reader is immediately plunged into this account of resistance in Kent during the Civil War as if hearing a contemporary news bulletin. It is a tribute to Robert Selby's confident fractured narrative and taut diction that the complexities of this conflict between theological authoritarianism and traditional cultural and economic interests are allowed to unfold so teasingly and suggestively in resonance with (and with allusions to) our own age. One of his major characters, the antiquarian Sir Edward Dering, himself politically conflicted, eventually decides that he simply wants 'to be left in peace [.] to run oasts and orchards'.