My rating: 1 of 5 stars
"Philip Ziegler makes his choice:
"Very occasionally one comes across a perfect book. It is not necessarily among the greatest. Persuasion is more nearly perfect than the shaggy and mountainous The Brothers Karamazov, but the latter bulks larger in the perspective of eternity. The perfect book, however, achieves precisely what it sets out to do, without an unnecessary or a missing word -- an immaculately conceived and fashioned whole.
"1066 and All That (1930) is such a book. Its main object was to mock the traditional presentation of history as a procession of kings and battles. This it did almost too successfully. ...
"The authors' favoured instrument was the pun. The 'Venomous Bead,' the 'Disillusion of the Monasteries,' Judge Jeffrey's furious remarks about Monmouth's followers -- the 'Bloody Asides', were refinements on the sort of howler with which the schoolmaster authors were well acquainted. The authors, however, evolved a pattern of sustained punning which, if not unique, was certainly rarely matched. ...
"The best jokes are noteworthy for their mastery of essential truths. The Civil War was 'the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).' Historians might complain that this errs on the side of over-simplification, but the issue could hardly be encapsulated in a more telling sentence. The 'Magna Charter' said 'that no one was to be put to death, save for some reason -- (except the Common People).' Such phrases tell the reader something of real importance, however frivolous the manner of telling.
"Chapter LXII is entitled 'A Bad Thing' and reads: 'America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a.' And a good thing too."
~~undated UK newspaper article
I hated this book. Had I but known that it was all puns, I would never have chucked it onto my TBR pile, given that I'm not a big fan of puns. There were some very funny puns in the book, but I felt as though many of them were over my head, & many more I perhaps didn't even recognize.
All in all, the only reasons I finished this book are that it was small, and because I needed a Y author for my Alpha Authors challenge, & Y authors are hard to come by.
"Chapter LXII is entitled 'A Bad Thing' and reads: 'America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a.' And a good thing too."
~~undated UK newspaper article
I hated this book. Had I but known that it was all puns, I would never have chucked it onto my TBR pile, given that I'm not a big fan of puns. There were some very funny puns in the book, but I felt as though many of them were over my head, & many more I perhaps didn't even recognize.
All in all, the only reasons I finished this book are that it was small, and because I needed a Y author for my Alpha Authors challenge, & Y authors are hard to come by.
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