Unruly
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Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb? They're probably best known in the US by this sketch . The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?" is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors. It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity. Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power? What is a king anyway? So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it. For example. Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons would try to