Most history books are written to correct other history books. The Brief History of England is no exception. Concentric by dint of eccentricity, ironic by conviction, paradoxical by apparently extemporaneous, Chesterton wanted to write a popular history—when most of the accounts of the history of England were extremely anti-popular—in which the fundamental thing lay not so much in the events in yes and in the importance that these would have had. In the words of Bernard Shaw, the author of this book was "the most concise and at the same time the most complete historian that this helpless country could find."