Every once in a while, someone at Infuze will write a review of one of their very favorite books.  Emily Zenker from the Books Department continues this series with a review of one of her all-time favorites, 1066 and All That by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman.

 

History – it’s that dreaded subject filled with dates and names that few people remember and even fewer care about. And the books we’re forced to read about it in school? Most of us can’t deny that we forsook our textbooks with a shudder as soon as we were finished with them. History often seems doomed to dwell in dry, lengthy pages from required-reading lists. So where does 1066 and All That (originally published in 1930), a self-declared “travesty of English history,” fit into the canon of historical textbooks? Answer: it doesn’t. And it doesn’t want to.

First off, authors W.C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman open the book in the spirit of full disclosure: “The object of this History is to console the reader. No other history does this.” With a whimsical approach to the actual concept of history (“It’s what you can remember”), the book manages to completely bypass typical historical fare and focus on what people really recall of it. In other words, no boring details need apply.

In fact, 1066 and All That is not a textbook at all, but a zany spoof , and one of the few books that can make me laugh out loud, over and over again. Every once in a while I feel like a fool in public because I can’t contain myself while reading about “the Order of the Bath (an extreme form of torture in the Middle Ages)”, and Edward VII, who “invented appendicitis.” My little yard sale-acquired version has actually been around the world with me three times, and every time I read it I find something new and ridiculous to amuse me.

The end of each section contains a questionnaire, which, at a glance, seem to test the reader’s knowledge. Upon reading them you’ll soon discover that, just like everything else in the text, the questions seem to be a spoof of spoofs. So while there may be illustrations and quizzes, no, there don’t appear to be almost any real historical facts in the whole book. Does that matter? If you’re willing to let Sellar and Yeatman do the talking, it shouldn’t seem important. After all, “It’s what you can remember.”
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