‘If I don’t have horses with monkeys riding them, the king of France won’t take me seriously…’
My dad was always aghast when I told him that I thought my history lessons at school were ‘boring’. He replied that the teachers must not be doing their job. Upon reflection, the old man was absolutely correct. History as it’s taught in British schools, a constant trudge through tedious contemporaneous sources and historical theory, is not fit for purpose. As an adult, I’ve turned to authors such as Bill Bryson and Yuval Noah Harari for my history. Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens by comedian David Mitchell is cut from the same cloth as Bryson’s historical non-fiction and it’s all the better for it…
Charting every English monarch from the (probably fictional) King Arthur through to Queen Elizabeth I (with a chapter devoted to every monarch in between), Unruly takes what is occasionally a dry topic (oh, another invasion of France…) and makes it accessible for idiots like me. I listened to Unruly as an audiobook read by the author and unsurprisingly, Mitchell’s talent for comic inflection added an extra layer of enjoyment for me. Anyone with even a passing interest in Peep Show will know that the man who played Mark Corrigan is the perfect fit for a book about English history, and Mitchell does a great job in condensing each reign down to their most interesting parts.
Unruly is funny, fascinating and frenetic in its pacing. Mitchell has a talent for moving the action along nicely, never pausing for too long on one monarch or dwelling on the dull stuff. Fans of the ubiquitous comedian (or indeed of Peep Show) will enjoy the warm familiarity of Mitchell’s curmudgeonly personality and those with an interest in English history will no doubt appreciate the yarn that Mitchell spins here. To summarise? Most of our monarchs throughout history were absolute shits, but interesting shits nevertheless.