A funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here – and who is to blame. David Mitchell is a British actor, comedian and writer. He is one half of the comedic duo Mitchell and Webb, alongside Robert Webb, whom he met at Cambridge University. There they were both part of the Cambridge Footlights, of which Mitchell became President. Together the duo starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show in which Mitchell plays Mark Corrigan. The show received a BAFTA and won three British Comedy Awards, while Mitchell won the award for Best Comedy Performance in 2009. The duo have written and starred in several sketch shows including The Mitchell and Webb Situation, That Mitchell and Webb Sound and most recently That Mitchell and Webb Look. Mitchell and Webb also star in the UK version of Apple's Get a Mac advertisement campaign. Their first film, Magicians, in which Mitchell plays traditional magician Harry, was released on 18 May 2007. 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.

JUST FANTASTIC. DELIGHTFULLY CONTRARY AND HILARIOUSLY CANTANKEROUS. VERY, VERY FUNNY' JESSE ARMSTRONG, CREATOR OF SUCCESSION AND PEEP SHOW Edward’s penchant for forceful solutions extended into the administrative arena where, Mitchell suggests, he waged a “war on nuance”. The same could be said of Mitchell’s portrayal of a sovereign whose reform of English law and currency mark him out as one of our nation’s most complex and important. This doesn’t really matter, though: like many of the characterisations in Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens, presenting Edward as the medieval world’s answer to Robin Smith is accurate enough, and strikes a lively alliance between those oldest of enemies: good humour and narrative history.Discover who we are and how we got here in comedian 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. 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. Instead he focuses his narrative around their unusual personal habits, idiosyncrasies and harmless traits 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.

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, HISTORIAN AND BROADCASTER Clever, amusing, gloriously bizarre and razor sharp.Mitchell [is] a funny man and a skilled historian.”― The TimesStill, our ends often overshadow us. History bristles with examples of people who died in poverty despite being great artists or musicians or having invented vulcanised rubber. The penurious demise casts a pall over their achievements. It can make their efforts seem futile – those people get defined by the injustice of fate. Similarly when the people meeting grisly ends are nasty, we can feel that justice has been done – but that doesn’t make sense either. What happened to Adolf Hitler in the end was no less than he deserved, but it didn’t restore justice. It didn’t make everything OK. 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

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. 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 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.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 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. 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

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. 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.