A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember Including One Hundred and Three good Things, Five Bad Kings, and Two Genuine Dates
1066 and All That A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember Including One Hundred and Three good Things, Five Bad Kings, and Two Genuine Dates
Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1930.
First edition. Original red cloth lettered in gilt in pictorial dustwrapper. Illustrated throughout in line by John Reynolds. A near fine copy, spotting to page edges, in a very near fine dustwrapper, exceptionally crisp and clean, with 1 short closed tear and some light spots to rear. Scarce, especially in this condition.
Originally serialised in Punch, the now famous spoof history book is at heart a parody of the relentlessly England-centric history in schoolbooks at the time. In mood and tone, if only indirectly in subject, it is a book generated from war, inspired by Robert Graves's wartime autobiography Goodbye to All That. Both Sellar and Yeatman had also served during WWI and they used a certain splendid irony to destroy any idea of the continuum of history - "History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself."[Compulsory Preface]. It was an immediate success and by 1955 had already been reprinted 38 times. A book about "history", it has itself became part of UK history, its title being used by journalists, headline writers and authors, [and immediately understood by readers], to indicate any span of British history.
Stock ID: 35710
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