Absolutely worth the listen!

David Mitchell being David Mitchell is always a selling point for me, so when I saw this, a mixture of my favourite topic and one of my favourite comedians, I knew I had to listen & im very glad I did. Worth every second, it was funny, engaging & very well written. I don’t know about anyone else, I’m glad it started where it did and finished where it did, seems like the perfect chunk of history to analyse. I’d love to see more work like this from David (on any period of history)

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4 people found this helpful

Great fun and informative

Really loved this factual but tong in cheek canter through English history. My only criticism was that the second half accelerated like he was late for an appointment

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1 person found this helpful

Outstanding!

I loved every minute of this book, from its incredible detail to the moments I laugh my arse off. I may just listen to it again. Thank David.

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Not one for Royalists ...but very funny

If you want some solid tome on every fine detail of the British monarchy told in a reverent fashion, this is not the book for you.
This takes you on a rapid jaunt from the earliest kings before they got all the bling right up to when England started having to share kings with those other nations... like Scotland. Despite David Mitchell's often comedic delivery and prose, I would hazard a guess it is historically correct - or at least the bits i knew about match up with what is told in the book but I'm no historian...hence listening to a history book by David Mitchell.
For fans of David, you'll love it even if you have no interest in the kings and queens of England. His deadpan delivery and hyper-annoyance at certain aspects of the whole monarchy thing is a delight and all too soon it was finished.
If you aren't a fan of David Mitchell you'll hate this. You'll probably write to him to tell him how much you hate it and tell all your friends (both of them).

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The way David put it

Learning how brutal and confused they all were. Fascinating, unbelievable and scared. No innocence or choices in life or death.

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Very good

Enjoyed it enormously. I Learned something and enjoyed the dry humour of David Mitchell

Shame more historical books don’t focus on also being entertaining

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Enjoyable, but

An otherwise interesting and entertaining listen, spoiled for me, by the excessive and unnecessary swearing.

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Hilarious

Refreshing to hear history told through such satire. Also, love that fact that it is narrated by David Mitchell. A must listen!

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Brilliant!

This is such an entertaining book I can't stop listening! Thank you David Mitchell
!

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We learn by laughing

if you're the kind of person willing to read/listen to a book about the history of British monarchs, this is unlikely to be your first on the topic, this might become a fast favourite for a quick and dirty overview with enough laughs to help you remember the trivia so you can brighten up a dinner party some day.

This isn't and doesn't try to be an academic text, it's a popular history and (let's be real) you'd be just as valid to store it with comedy books as history ones. It's a fun romp through a particularly unfun (though weirdly compelling) aspect of history with just the right level of facetiousness and sarcasm that you won't be put off if you're not a royalist in the way you might be if you were trying to slog your way through fawning biographies written in ivory towers by big shot blue-blooded professors with an agenda somewhere in the 1800s.

It rings with sincerity in 2023, and an aversion to getting too blinded by the bling, with a fair level of contempt for the whole institution as you'd expect from a comedian. It's also very good as a history text, especially in the popular history genre, presenting a fairly coherent analysis and attempting to contextualise events for a modern audience as they happened without trying to feign an objective or balanced viewpoint (the running gag of what things cost historically relative to modern money is brilliantly done and needs to become standard academic practice, it's much more evocative that sticking a phone number in front of a dollar sign in brackets after an arbitrary number of arbitrary units of currency that don't exist anymore).

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