1066 And All That

Review of the history parody by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman

Anyone British born before 1960, in the good old days of memorizing historical facts, would find this book hilarious. But most Americans wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between “truth” and a deliberate distortion of it. Even watching The White Princess and reading all the books about Henry VIII’s wives and reading Shakespeare’s history plays wouldn’t help. This is not Monty Python in prose. You should enjoy real history — big doses of it — before sampling an erudite parody such as this.

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