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

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It’s the same with William the Conqueror. At least that was fate, not a creative choice. His bowels exploded while some monks in Caen were trying to cram his bloated corpse into a sarcophagus that was far too snug for him. The consequent stench rather ruined the solemnity of the remaining funeral rites.

It’s also fair to say that, although he is not a doctorate level historian, Mitchell’s depth of knowledge about the history of his country is impressive. On Norton’s chat show, he mentioned that writing the book became his obsession during the pandemic. It shows. His exposition of the details of each monarch’s rein is extraordinary, especially given the number of the players who shared a name. There are lots of Edwards, Henrys, and Richards, as well as a few Matildas, Elizabeths, Marys, and Margarets.

His story ends with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, though you’d think there are more fascinatingly terrible kings and queens that need to be accounted for, not least Hitler fan Edward VIII, one-man pie shop George IV, and – if Olivia Colman’s turn in The Favourite is anything to go by – bonkers woman-baby Queen Anne. The intensity of intra-familial hatred in many periods of royal history makes the William and Harry rift look like a tersely raised eyebrow over a Boxing Day game of Trivial Pursuit.’ Photograph: FD/Francis Dias/Newspix International Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history. CLEVER, FUNNY, MAKES YOU THINK QUITE DIFFERENTLY ABOUT HISTORY' DAN SNOW, HISTORIAN AND BROADCASTER

Signed Edition with an exclusive additional chapter focusing on Hengist and Horsa- a standard edition is also available Forget about an audiobook, Mitchell ought to do a video in which he, in character as Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, poshly declaims while pacing his shoebox Croydon flat. He might particularly enjoy reading this passage about why it’s unnecessary to decide between the awfulness of King Stephen and Queen Matilda: “They were both twats. They may not have been able to help being twats – the mores and values of their times and of their class may have made them twats. But they were twats and terrible things happened as a result.” Just to repeat, David Mitchell is a comedian and an actor, NOT a historian* and as the title suggests, this is a ridiculous book, NOT a serious one. The stories he is telling us -starting from nonexistent, mythical King Arthur and finishing with Elizabeth I - are still mostly accurate, but as they are viewed through the lens of the 21st century, they are also out-of-context, incomplete and incongruous. It's a given. Mitchell is openly judgmental, uses the benefit of hindsight mercilessly and serves it all with lots of scathing humour and swearing. I felt almost bereft that he left the storytelling off at the Tudors and did not go any further despite of what he claims at the end.

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A later ruler, King Stephen, owed his throne to the time he spent quivering in a bog – and in this case I mean a privy. Had he, as an ambitious minor prince, not suffered a sudden, violent bout of food poisoning while on board a ship in Barfleur harbour in 1120, he wouldn’t have disembarked before it headed into the Channel and sank. Everyone on the ship died except for a solitary Norman butcher, and among the watery dead was the heir to the throne. So, when King Henry I died 15 years later, Stephen’s path to kingship had been cleared by diarrhoea. He hurried to Westminster and got himself crowned, then had one of the most unsuccessful reigns in English history, entirely dominated by a savage civil war. There are only 2 reasons for someone not to like this book. One they don’t understand old school British humour. Therefore, before you read take a minute to look up David Mitchell on YouTube and see if you like his humour. If you don’t or you don’t understand it then do not read this book! Also get a better sense of humour. The second reason would be if you go into this thinking it’s a serious history book. It’s not, but again take 10 seconds to see it’s written by a comedian and not a history before you get really disappointed. If you do both those things and still don’t like it. Well I have no idea, try it again maybe? The divine right of kings, heraldry, primogeniture and porphyrogeniture (the hilarious rule of succession whereby the son born to a king in office has first dibs on the throne over older siblings born before daddy took office) are, to Mitchell, really devices to retrospectively justify power grabs by inbred sociopaths or their mums. Perhaps this is how history should be done: not by patient scholars, nor by the telegenic likes of Olusoga or Worsley but by free-swearing actor-comedians David Mitchell is a riot, and his review of the history of the monarchy had me absolutely rolling. It’s quite a feat to be both hilarious and exceptionally accurate when writing a book like this, but Mitchell has managed it with aplomb. And despite being a laugh-a-minute, the humor never veers into the obnoxious and never feels try-hard.