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

Product Information

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined. And i think this is where the problem is, the audio book i suspect is far superior experience than the printed book. I wasn't expecting or hoping that this would be a serious book after all i have seen DM on the box i thought i was in for an account steaming with the wry sarcasm we know him for, somthing along the lines of Terry Jones fabulous history books of perhaps the humor of the horrible history's. JUST FANTASTIC. DELIGHTFULLY CONTRARY AND HILARIOUSLY CANTANKEROUS. VERY, VERY FUNNY’ JESSE ARMSTRONG, CREATOR OF SUCCESSION AND PEEP SHOW

CLEVER, AMUSING, GLORIOUSLY BIZARRE AND RAZOR SHARP. MITCHELL - A FUNNY MAN AND A SKILLED HISTORIAN - TELLS STORIES THAT ARE INTERESTING AND FUN. HERE IS HORRIBLE HISTORIES FOR GROWNUPS' GERARD DEGROOT, THE TIMES Clever, amusing, gloriously bizarre and razor sharp.Mitchell [is] a funny man and a skilled historian.”― The TimesA funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here - and who is to blame. Mitchell clearly knows his history, with a book that owes as much to Monty Python as it does to Simon Schama’ ANDREW MARR, BROADCASTER Discover who we are and how we got here in comedian, star of Peep Show and student of history David Mitchell’s UNRULY: A History of England’s Kings and Queens– a thoughtful, funny exploration of the founding fathers and mothers of England, and subsequently Britain.

Perhaps the most undignified English king, though, was John. The extent of his indignity was a surprise to me when I was researching my new book about the kings and queens of England, because posterity has focused so much on how bad he was – bad as in dastardly. And he was dastardly – dishonest and brutal. During the reign of his predecessor, his elder brother Richard the Lionheart, he tried to steal the throne by pretending Richard was dead. Once Richard had genuinely died, he murdered the only rival claimant, his nephew Arthur, possibly with his bare hands, which feels like unnecessary attention to detail.

In 2023, we flatter ourselves that we no longer put foes’ eyes out with swords or die of bubonic plague, and that the NHS, universal suffrage, widespread literacy, CBT, social media and increased life expectancy make us different from the toxic wingnuts who predominate in Mitchell’s book. Unruly is worth reading, not just for its exemplary gag to fact ratio, but to disabuse us of such delusions. 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. 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. Bombs the equivalent to 2 Little Boys were dropped by the Israel down the Gaza killing tens of thousand of Palestinian civilians !