Think you’ve had a rotten year? Thing again… as this horrible history of Britain shows, whatever life is throwing at us in the 21st Century, our ancestors had it a whole lot worse.

War, terror, economic collapse... Britain has been there before. And for the likes of the Celts, or the Tudors, or the Georgians, these catastrophes were much harder to bear.

Try 1349 (the black death), or 1536 (the year the king went mad...), or 1720 (when a biblical fog descended on England for months and literally laid waste to the nation). The fact is that rat for rat, recession for recession, gory death for gory death, the ten really rotten years featured in this book beat our current travails hands down.

But Britain’s Rottenest Years is not just a bad news story. It is a fantastically readable leapfrog through British history which takes us, via the interesting bits, from the misery of the Roman invasion of AD60 (when 50,000 foreign thugs arrived on our shores) to the Thatcherite year of discontent of 1981 –the ideal gift for anyone who needs cheering up...

About the author

Derek Wilson is one of Britain’s leading popular historians. Since leaving Cambridge, where he took the Archbishop Cranmer Prize for post-gradua

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