The English Civil Wars: 1642-1651

This is a good intro to the military side of the Civil Wars. It deals briefly with the reasons for the conflict, but these books are about military history (another Osprey Essential Histories one), and so you don't really expect to have too much detail with regard to the why. As I started out with absolutely no idea of what happened, why, or anything like that (the only thing I can remember doing at school with regard to the English Civil War was colouring in pictures of cavaliers and roundheads--although I wasn't even sure which one was which side), anything was news to me. I enjoyed reading this actually, it was very good for an overview of the campaigning, it talked about the Battle of Preston, which was quite fun because there's a restaurant not far from us in which apparently Cromwell stayed during the battle, and it talked about the military reasons for the failure of the king. I have still, however, to work out what happened afterwards and why. It seemed to end a little abruptly, but to be fair, once the campaigns have ended and the war is won, military history is a bit unnecessary.