The Kings and Queens of England

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I bought it as a bedside read and because the book is divided into easy-to-chew sections for that purpose.

A bit on the fluffy side, but as always for a book like this you wont get a lot of detail on specific monarchs just a good general picture of their reign. Starting with Alfred the Great and ending with QEII, each royal has about five pages dedicated to them with side bars for interesting or events in British history. England, Scotland, and Ireland had shared a monarch for more than a hundred years, since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland inherited the English and Irish thrones from his first cousin twice removed, Queen Elizabeth I.

The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. The intensity of intra-familial hatred in many periods of royal history makes the William and Harry rift look like a tersely raised eyebrow over a Boxing Day game of Trivial Pursuit. Listed in red are The Heptarchy, the collective name given to the seven main Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms located in the southeastern two-thirds of the island that were unified to form the Kingdom of England.

If you want a serious look at the history of Britain's monarchy, this is not the book you are looking for. A later ruler, King Stephen, owed his throne to the time he spent quivering in a bog – and in this case I mean a privy.

Among them were Harold Godwinson (recognised as king by the Witenagemot after the death of Edward the Confessor), Harald Hardrada (King of Norway who claimed to be the rightful heir of Harthacnut) and Duke William II of Normandy (vassal to the King of France, and first cousin once-removed of Edward the Confessor).