What sort of person were you when you were eighteen years old? What had you accomplished by that point in your life and what were your hopes and dreams for the future? Or, if you haven’t reached that age yet, what would you like to achieve before your eighteenth birthday? In her new book, Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, Alice Loxton explores the stories of eighteen historical figures, some famous and some more obscure, with a focus on the first eighteen years of their lives and how their childhoods shaped the adults they would later become.

The book is arranged in chronological order, so the first historical figure to be covered is the Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar, the Venerable Bede, and the last is the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Each section is quite short – it’s not a long book and there are lots of lives to get through – but I think Alice Loxton achieves what she sets out to do, which is to shine a light on the early lives of her subjects and the ways in which they are influenced by not only their own family background and upbringing, but also the world around them. She looks only briefly at the achievements that make them famous after the age of eighteen, but that information is available elsewhere and this book is trying to do something different.

Loxton chooses her subjects from all walks of life and a range of different backgrounds, including royalty, artists, engineers, actors and writers. They are almost equally split between men and women and England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all represented. I was less interested in the people I’d read about before, such as Elizabeth I and the Empress Matilda, but there were others I was completely unfamiliar with and I found these chapters fascinating. I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing at all about the life of Jacques Francis, a diver originally from West Africa who attempted to recover the wreck of the Mary Rose during the Tudor period, or Sarah Biffin, an English artist born in the late 18th century without arms or legs.

Alice Loxton’s writing style is very readable and I flew through this book in much less time than it normally takes me to read non-fiction. Although it’s not marketed as being for any particular age group, it’s clearly aimed at readers closer to the age of her subjects, so she doesn’t bombard us with too much information and provides sources and notes at the back of the book rather than interrupting the text. She tries to find analogies that will make sense to young, modern readers, such as comparing a royal progress with a rock band going on tour, and imagines what the lives of some of her other historical figures would look like as a film adaptation or a slideshow. The main biographical chapters are also interspersed with other chapters describing a very special 18th birthday party, but I’ll leave you to find out more about that for yourself if you read the book!

Eighteen would be a fun, accessible way for teenagers to explore British history, but for those of us who are older it’s still an entertaining read and provides a good starting point for further investigation into some of these fascinating historical figures. I’m now interested in reading Alice Loxton’s previous book, Uproar!, about printmakers in Georgian London.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.