Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens

by David Mitchell

Believing in ideas is one of those attributes like libido or skill at driving a car that most people reckon they possess in above-average quantities – but that’s mathematically impossible.

thinking outside boxes can sometimes result in thousands of young men getting buried in them.

People found it much easier to believe in a rose-tinted view of the past than a utopian future. They still do: hence ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’.

Violence is a constant, the religious views are just the accompanying spin.

The thought that disasters are your fault is comforting, on some level. It gives you the illusion of control when, in truth, something horrible came out of the blue and ruined your life.

Having to absorb weird thing after weird thing after weird thing is what being at school largely consists of.

He was predictable. That’s the key. It’s disappointing in a lover but, in a feudal overlord, it hits the spot.

The odd thing about Henry VIII is that we know such a lot about his feelings and desires. He lived his life in public, like a cross between Kim Kardashian and Vladimir Putin.

It was like he was a teenage girl who had put on a short skirt to go to a party and then her parents had just said, ‘Have a nice time, darling.’ Nightmare. Cranmer had to stomp back upstairs to look for something so skimpy it showed his religion.