Unruly: The Number One Bestseller ‘Horrible Histories for grownups’ The Times

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An eye poke for stiff-upper-lip monarchists, but good for many grins among the less worshipful of England’s royals. How this happened, who it happened to, and why the hell it matters are all questions that Mitchell answers with brilliance, wit, and the full erudition of a man who once studied history—and won’t let it off the hook for the mess it’s made. This book is bloody brilliant!! The humour is great, the history is interesting and the whole book filled me with warmth and enjoyment. Books like these are what the history world needs! Many of my friends who aren’t big history fans would read this, it allows people to learn and enjoy history without taking itself too seriously which is a massive problem in the history world.

How this happened, who it happened to and why it matters in modern Britain are all questions David answers with brilliance, wit and the full erudition of a man who once studied history - and won't let it off the hook for the mess it's made. Mitchell clearly knows his history, with a book that owes as much to Monty Python as it does to Simon Schama’ ANDREW MARR, BROADCASTER In the end, I found the book educational and entertaining. But I am unlikely to retain the astounding number of factoids about each reign of the history he covers (He stops at the death of Elizabeth I. Perhaps the pandemic was over before he could bring us up to date.) How this happened, who it happened to and why the hell it matters in twenty-first-century Britain are all questions David answers with brilliance, wit and the full erudition of a man who once studied history - and is damned if he'll let it off the hook for the mess it's made of everything.How this happened, who it happened to and why it matters in modern Britain are all questions David answers with brilliance, wit and the full erudition of a man who once studied history – and won’t let it off the hook for the mess it’s made. The downside? Much like I imagine Shakespeare's fan base did in the late 16th century, I found myself asking "do we really need yet another Henry?"; the middle is a bit of a stogey haze of indistinguishable Henrys, or Johns or Edwards, who fought the French, lost, and died of dysentery, only for the little brats they spawned to repeat the whole futile cycle, in seeming perpetuity. Perhaps the author is making this point, i.e. that it was all futile, by repeating this refrain: one king, one pointless war, one gruesome and untimely death, one thirty minute chapter about someone I've bever heard of and won't remember, I just wished he could have done so slighty more succinctly.

JUST FANTASTIC. DELIGHTFULLY CONTRARY AND HILARIOUSLY CANTANKEROUS. VERY, VERY FUNNY’ JESSE ARMSTRONG, CREATOR OF SUCCESSION AND PEEP SHOW I don't think anyone other than David Mitchell could have written this book. It's clever, funny and makes you think quite differently about history we thought we knew' - Dan Snow History is one bloody thing after another; David Mitchell is on a mission to hammer this point home, with his trademark wit and angry logic. He takes us from before William the conquer, to Elizabeth I, in 30-odd short chapters, one for each king and Queen of England. In doing so satirising both the absurdity of the notion of monarchy, and the stuffy inaccessibility of accedemic historians. Indeed, the book is at its most enjoyable when the rapier of Mitchell's lacerating wit is unfurled against said historians and their navel gazing debates.

CLEVER, FUNNY, MAKES YOU THINK QUITE DIFFERENTLY ABOUT HISTORY' DAN SNOW, HISTORIAN AND BROADCASTER But this ruthlessness, while showing ambition and vigour, was no barrier to incompetence or vainglorious delusion. For most of the middle ages from the Norman Conquest onwards, the kings of England were obsessed with acquiring or re-acquiring large sections of France. They went so far as to claim that they were in fact the rightful kings of France despite all the evidence to the contrary and repeatedly threw all their resources into mounting military expeditions to ruin the lives of thousands of innocent French residents which achieved, in even the medium term, precisely nothing.