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

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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. JUST FANTASTIC. DELIGHTFULLY CONTRARY AND HILARIOUSLY CANTANKEROUS. VERY, VERY FUNNY’ JESSE ARMSTRONG, CREATOR OF SUCCESSION AND PEEP SHOW But this ruthlessness, while showing ambition and vigour, was no barrier to incompetence or vainglorious delusion. For most of the middle ages from the Norman Conquest onwards, the kings of England were obsessed with acquiring or re-acquiring large sections of France. They went so far as to claim that they were in fact the rightful kings of France despite all the evidence to the contrary and repeatedly threw all their resources into mounting military expeditions to ruin the lives of thousands of innocent French residents which achieved, in even the medium term, precisely nothing.

This article was amended on 16 October 2023 to remove a reference that was inconsistent with the Guardian’s style guidelines.

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A funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here – and who is to blame. 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 The divine right of kings, heraldry, primogeniture and porphyrogeniture (the hilarious rule of succession whereby the son born to a king in office has first dibs on the throne over older siblings born before daddy took office) are, to Mitchell, really devices to retrospectively justify power grabs by inbred sociopaths or their mums. Perhaps this is how history should be done: not by patient scholars, nor by the telegenic likes of Olusoga or Worsley but by free-swearing actor-comedians 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 His story ends with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, though you’d think there are more fascinatingly terrible kings and queens that need to be accounted for, not least Hitler fan Edward VIII, one-man pie shop George IV, and – if Olivia Colman’s turn in The Favourite is anything to go by – bonkers woman-baby Queen Anne.

Mitchell clearly knows his history, with a book that owes as much to Monty Python as it does to Simon Schama’ ANDREW MARR, BROADCASTER His narrative begins, boldly, with a king who didn’t exist. “Gandalf is fictional,” Mitchell writes. “Arthur is a lie.” And yet lies, myths and medieval PR makeovers are what make this story compelling: England created itself from its own myths, while simultaneously satirically debunking them. To that end, Mitchell quotes Dennis, a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who skewers the allure of Camelot: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” I can’t recommend this book enough. Very funny and interesting, it is above all a proper work of history’ CHARLIE HIGSON

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Forget about an audiobook, Mitchell ought to do a video in which he, in character as Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, poshly declaims while pacing his shoebox Croydon flat. He might particularly enjoy reading this passage about why it’s unnecessary to decide between the awfulness of King Stephen and Queen Matilda: “They were both twats. They may not have been able to help being twats – the mores and values of their times and of their class may have made them twats. But they were twats and terrible things happened as a result.”