God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil WarsBy Michael BraddickAllen Lane £30, 758 pagesFT bookshop price: £24

It is fiendishly difficult for academic historians to write for the general public. A scholarly book becomes a general one, academics tend to imagine, by adding a few explanations. Tell the public what the Grand Remonstrance is, then motor on exactly as you would write for the academic journal Past and Present. But good popular history, of course, needs more than explanations. It requires a personal touch - narrative drive, graceful prose. We need to care about John Pym and Charles I. Yet if the hapless academic does manage to provide these excitements, he runs the risk of appearing vulgar to his colleagues.

Michael Braddick's diligent, scholarly survey of the tumultuous years of the English civil war, God's Fury, England's Fire, inadvertently highlights these difficulties. His impersonal approach means the book is likely to be of interest only to specialists, but it's packed with information they will find over-familiar. It's written in the kind of clear style that academic historians fondly imagine will not deter a popular readership, but a sentence such as "In the autumn, a priority at Westminster was to begin to reduce public expenses" doesn't exactly set the pulse racing, vital though its point may be.

Also, Braddick writes as if mentioning a story is the same as telling it. The opening doesn't so much describe Charles I's botched escape from Oxford as say that it took place. For a reader new to the period, this is not enough. And Braddick's wish to seem academically balanced sometimes makes for hesitancies that leave the reader feeling lost. For instance, he writes that anti-popery wasn't always about Catholics. The godly did attack Church of England ministers who'd fallen in with Archbishop Laud's reforms, but this was because of a bottomless horror of anything that looked as if it might be Catholic. Braddick knows this, but shouldn't assume the reader does. He also slights his own achievements. The war was about religion, but was triggered by a row about taxation and increased taxation was its consequence. Yet Braddick's earlier work on tax reforms in this period is summarised in a few short paragraphs.

Braddick is strong on the economic benefits the war brought - army contractors could make fortunes, then as now - and he intelligently points out the likely economic effect of having so many men under arms in the form of higher wages. The 100 pages of notes reveal that he knows the Thomason Tracts pamphlet collection very well, and it is an inspired design idea to reproduce so many pamphlet title pages. Overall, this is a fine and valiant book for experts or undergraduates, but not ideal for beginners.

Diane Purkiss is author of 'The English Civil War: A People's History' (HarperPerennial)