Davies' story starts where it finishes - with the proposition that Britain was not and is not an island. Only 9000 years ago, it was a peninsular of Europe, joined by marshy ground that is now at the bottom of the North Sea. Now Britain is once again joined, not only by the Channel Tunnel, but by increasing political and economic ties with the European Union... The Isles is a historiographical milestone, the culmination of years of revisionism by a generation of scholars whose common purpose has been to dismantle the 'Anglocentric' version of British history...