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As a schoolboy I was told that on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor in 1644, as the rival armies drew up, a sturdy yokel was found ploughing his fields. When brought up to speed about the war between King and parliament he asked, "What has they two fallen out again?".

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On 15th June 2015, Magna Carta celebrates its 800th anniversary. More has been written about this document than about virtually any other piece of parchment in world history. A great deal has been wrongly attributed to it: democracy, Habeas Corpus, Parliament, and trial by jury are all supposed somehow to trace their origins to Runnymede and 1215. In reality, if any of these ideas are even touched upon within Magna Carta, they are found there only in embryonic form.

The post The greatest charter? appeared first on OUPblog.

For a change, I thought I’d post a book review today. Stones For My Father, by Trilby Kent, is a historical children’s novel published in Canada by Tundra Books. Set during the Boer war, it’s the story of an Afrikaans girl, Corlie Roux, whose life is changed forever when her farm is burned by the British army and she has to escape into the bush. From the days hiding out with the laager, to her final imprisonment in a concentration camp, Corlie’s struggle to survive in the beautiful but harsh African landscape is richly and evocatively described. Animals, in particular, are so well-painted that they leap off the page. This is one of those books that leaves you feeling as if you have really been there.

“We continued in silence, stopping only to watch a goshawk slice between the treetops on its afternoon death-cruise. When we reached the river-bank, I tore off a thread from the hem of my dress and showed Gert how to tie it onto a fishhook. We gathered sticks for rods, and used bright protea leaves for bait. Then we slipped our dry-soled feet into the sparkling water and waited, trying to ignore our growling stomachs.”

Corlie’s mother – who hates her, for reasons that are revealed at the end of the book – is one of the adult characters who are so well-described that they seem to have physical weight in the mind.

“’Get out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Take your brother to Oom Flip’s. He owes us a box of tobacco.’ Despite her godly airs, my mother was a prodigious smoker. Pa had never approved of her pipe habit, but Pa wasn’t around anymore to tell her so. My mother’s face had turned quite red, the veins in her temples bulging where her hair had been scraped back into a severe bun. ‘Are you deaf, girl? Do you want me to get the sjambok?’”

There was a discussion recently about hope in children’s books on the Balaclava mailing list, and I thought this was an interesting book in relation to that discussion. Corlie’s life is tough and unredeemed by love. No-one comes out of this well, not the British who burn farms and herd children like Corlie into concentration camps to die, nor the Boers who consider Africa given to them by God and casually beat the African servants by whose knowledge and skills they have been kept alive in the bush. There is a sense of people made hard by their hard lives, and all – from soldiers to children - caught up in the chaotic whirlwind of war.

The most obvious source of hope is in the figure of Corporal Byrne, the Canadian soldier fighting on the British side, who finally gives Corlie a future. But I think there is another one, which pervades the whole book – the physicality of Africa itself; the animals, the vegetation, the la