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    Cover of 1066 and All That

    1066 and All That

    Walter Carruthers Sellar, Robert Julian Yeatman · 1930

    A tongue-in-cheek history of England which takes as its basic tenet the idea that history is only what you can remember and is therefore a collection of half remembered facts. The authors maintain that there are only two memorable dates, these being 1066 (the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Invasion) and 55 BC (the first Roman Invasion). The book begins with the Roman invasion and continues to the end of WW1, when America ‘was clearly thus Top Nation, and history came to a.

    Fiction & LiteratureHistoryArts, Games & Media
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    4recommend
    7mentions
    6people
    2018–2026years
    57% recommend43% neutral

    Mentions per year

    201820192020202120222023202420252026

    What Hacker News says

    1. robotresearcherMar 2026
      > "was 1066 really all that?"

      This article might exist just for this joke in the sub-headline. Pretty good.

      "1066 and all that" is a highly influential satirical history book from 1930, and "[X] and all that" a meme/idiom in UK English.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That

      thread
    2. ChrisMarshallNYOct 2025
      I enjoyed this book (1066 and All That): https://www.amazon.com/1066-All-That-Memorable-Classics/dp/0...
      thread
    3. cafardSep 2020
      Umm, YT. And Roadkill, though I don't think he ever gets on stage in Snow Crash. I didn't know that it would be on the test...

      1066! You should find a copy of 1066 and All That. I'm slightly surprised that the Gutenberg Project hasn't made it available. I know a few dates before and after that, but not that many.

      thread
    4. pjc50Aug 2018
      There is an excellent fun little book "1066 and All That", which parodies English history as people remember it from their education. It happens to have been written in 1930 but most of its jokes hold up, and the subset that people remember from that period hasn't changed quite so much.

      History as remembered by the public is always going to be fragments made into a mythos. The problem is that some of that mythos defines the propaganda contours of the present, whether that's people saying the US civil war wasn't about slavery or whether it's Brexiteers saying that "no deal will be fine because we survived the second world war".

      thread
    5. chrismorganJan 2024
      I’m afraid that already happened after World War I, according to the final sentence of 1066 and All That <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That>:

      > America was thus clearly Top Nation, and History came to a .

      (For any confused Americans, remember . is a full stop, not a period.)

      thread
    6. cafardJan 2024
      According to Yeatman and Sellar, that's the only date most of the English know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That
      thread

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