1066 And All That

The book is a parody of the Whiggish style of history teaching in English schools at the time, in particular of Our Island Story. It purports to contain “all the history you can remember”, and, in fifty-two chapters, covers the history of England from Roman times through 1066 “and all that”, up to the end of World War I, at which time “America was thus clearly Top Nation, and history came to a .” (This last chapter is titled “A Bad Thing”; the final pun even requires the English term “full stop”, rather than the American “period”, to work.) It is based on the idea that history is what you can remember and is full of examples of half-remembered facts.

Publisher: The Folio Society, London 1990