From Booklist
Prepare to brush up on all those kings and PMs--and love doing it! Muirden, who says he (no historian) undertook this book to teach himself as much as readers, casts British history in verse, from Julius Caesar's invasion to the year England won the World Cup, and leaves one wondering why we switched to prose to write nonfiction. He versifies in rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets--the the form for light, skipping verse in English, as in Muirden's model, Hilaire Belloc's hilariously morbid Cautionary Verses--and indulges the commonest off-rhymes in English, -a / -er and aw / or, to the max. Those choices made, he needs remarkably few anachronistic quips to keep us smiling as we absorb, again or anew, the succession of Britain's rulers and the events that transformed British society. Certainly the book would be somewhat less delightful without the cartoons, one per page, of David Eccles, who is much freer with anachronisms, but hooray, it isn't without them. Now, how about American history in, say, "Yankee Doodle" stanzas? Ray Olson
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Book Description
This cheerful poem has been written To tell the history of Britain; For People puzzled by the Past- If this means YOU, here's help at last! From Celts to Churchill, it relates (With all the most Important Dates) Our country's convoluted course . . . Why Richard hollered for a horse; Why Eleanor was such a catch; Why no one liked the Spanish Match; The pros and cons of Laissez Faire; Smart Georgian ladies' underwear; Why Charles the Second went to plays; Why Queen Jane reigned for just nine days; The causes of the Irish trouble; The bursting of the South Sea Bubble; That giant glasshouse in Hyde Park; The First World War's igniting spark . . . Brought up with the iambic pentameters of Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses ringing in his ears, James Muirden has written his rhyming history of Britain in an equally simple and entertaining form. Charmingly irreverent, magically humorous yet rigorously accurate, and delightfully illustrated by David Eccles, this is the perfect gift for any Anglophile.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This cheerful poem has been writtenTo tell the history of Britain; For People puzzled by the Past- If this means YOU, here's help at last! From Celts to Churchill, it relates (With all the most Important Dates) Our country's convoluted course . . . Why Richard hollered for a horse; Why Eleanor was such a catch; Why no one liked the Spanish Match; The pros and cons of Laissez Faire; Smart Georgian ladies' underwear; Why Charles the Second went to plays; Why Queen Jane reigned for just nine days; The causes of the Irish trouble; The bursting of the South Sea Bubble; That giant glasshouse in Hyde Park; The First World War's igniting spark . . .