“Unruly”

David Mitchell

From right at the beginning of the first chapter:

England was a word that gradually gained currency, like mansplain or staycation, and it was fully in use by the time William the Conquerer was king of it. I expect you’ve heard of him. Most people know that, in 1606, William the Conquerer (not at that point so named) won the Battle of Hastings and became king of England. When it comes to the likely readership of this book, that ‘most’ must rise to ‘all’. If there is anyone reading this book who didn’t already know that, I would love to hear from you because you are genuinely reading in a genre that was previously of no interest. You, if you exist, and I bet you don’t, are an absolute confounder of the algorithms.It would be like someone reading a biography of Elvis Presley who did not already know that he was a singer. What you are doing is probably more statistically remarkable than what William the Conquerer did. (14)

I have exciting news for the author about the level of knowledge I had about British history coming in to this book! To whit, none; I grabbed it specifically because I don’t know anything about the topic and have been wanting to learn more.

This feels very approachable and very British; it’s like Cunk on Britain in written form, and taking itself marginally more seriously. Also, notably uncensored, as the chapter on Cnut covered.1 I will admit, here at the end of the book, that I don’t know that I’ve retained much detail, but I wasn’t really expecting to — the point of reading this was that I knew nothing about British history, and wanted to have at least some broad-strokes vague ideas, not that I was trying to make a career pivot into ‘historian.’ So I think that’s alright. And I wouldn’t be a great historian, particularly British historian, as my level of attention to details like “which number Elizabeth was that” is such that I was very surprised that the book ended after Elizabeth I. It says, right on the cover, “A tale of power, glory, and gore from Arthur to Elizabeth I,” and I was still expecting it to carry on all the way up to the death of Elizabeth II. Whoops.

Anyhow, for the goal of “a broad overview and an entertaining read,” this absolutely delivered. If you’re interested, give it a go.2

If you can’t guess what sorts of jokes were made throughout, I don’t know how to be more clear. ↩