There are some books that are defined by their titles. 1984. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Guns, Germs and Steel. However, there are others that are undone by their titles and Conquest is one of them. Any reader scanning the bookshelves would think this a detailed account of the Roman conquest of Britain – after all, that’s what it says on the cover! But in fact, the conquest only takes up about a quarter of the book.

A better, but less marketable title, would have been Britain: from prehistory to posthistory by way of the Roman occupation. What Addis does, and does brilliantly, is weave the history of Britain from a time before there was any history (that is, before any local historical records) into the wider history of Europe and then take that through the conquest, the centuries as a somewhat restive Roman province, through to the fall of the western Empire and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.

Addis is particularly good at bringing readers up to date with the astonishing results of aDNA testing, which is completely rewriting our understanding of the movements of people in prehistoric Europe. Archaeologists, suspicious of tales of the mass movements of people, have been busily reinterpreting all such migrations as cultural transfers. However, what is now clear is that many of these cultural transformations were indeed the result of one lot of people moving in and kicking out the previous residents: the Beaker folk and the Anglo-Saxons among them.

This is narrative history at its best but don’t believe what it says on the cover: the sweep of this book is truly panoramic, from the end of the Ice Age through to the start of modern Britain, and it deserves the widest readership. Hopefully, the title won’t put potential readers off.