A review by shanaqui
A History of Britain in Ten Enemies by Terry Deary

informative lighthearted medium-paced

2.0

Terry Deary's A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is pretty much what you'd expect of someone who wrote for Horrible Histories: flippant, irreverent, willing to be sarcastic about everything, and... almost completely unsourced in a gossipy, opinionated account of history. It's especially jarring when what he writes is contradictory to something I know is a prominent theory (e.g. that the building of wooden henges wasn't replaced by the building of stone ones, but contemporaneous with them and linked to them: wood for the living, stone for the dead).

At that point I settled in to read it more or less for the tone and anecdotes, and to take everything with a heaping of salt. Each chapter does have a couple of references, but since they're unnumbered and there's only 2-3, it's not very convincing.

If you're just interested in a casual read, it's probably perfect; for me, the tone didn't quite land, and it turns out I get really irritated by such flagrant lack fo sourcing.