Clara’s Verdict
Ian Mortimer has carved out a genuinely distinctive niche in popular history by asking not what happened, but what it felt like to be there. His Time Traveller’s Guides series remains the best argument I know for treating the past as a living place rather than a sequence of dates. Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History is something slightly different – looser, more playful, occasionally verging on the gleefully eccentric – and it is all the better for it. Read by Mortimer himself at his driest and most engaged, this is ten hours and fifty-eight minutes of history as it should be: curious, surprising, and cheerfully unwilling to take itself too seriously.
The format is deceptively simple: take four periods – the fourteenth century, the Elizabethan age, the Restoration, the Regency – and explore each through an A to Z of topics. What emerges is not a survey but a series of illuminated corners, and some of those corners turn out to be considerably more interesting than the main corridors that conventional histories spend all their time in.
About the Audiobook
Published in October 2025 by Old Street Publishing, this collection covers four periods of English history, each treated alphabetically. From buttons to toenails, from the Great Plague to the Great Freeze, from Armada to Austen, Mortimer pursues threads that mainstream history tends to leave unpulled. Why did pistols supersede swords in duelling? What would you actually eat at a smart Elizabethan dinner party, and should you really kiss your hostess on the lips upon arrival? How did Regency Londoners consume quite so much port? Why did the button change social life so profoundly in the Middle Ages?
These aren’t trivial questions. Mortimer’s point – as always – is that the texture of daily life reveals more about a period than its battles and treaties. The button chapter alone illuminates the medieval wool trade, social hierarchy, and craft economy in ways that no purely political history manages. The Restoration sections on coffee houses and the theatre unpack how a society rebuilds its public culture after repression. The Regency section on drinking habits is simultaneously funny and genuinely revealing about trade networks, taxation policy, and public health in early nineteenth-century London. At just under eleven hours, this is a book you can dip into and out of, but it rewards sustained listening too – there are through-lines and recurring observations that only become fully visible across the whole.
Mortimer is also very good at the unexpected connection: the observation that illuminates not just its period but something about our own. That quality – the ability to use history as a mirror – is what elevates this above the merely informative.
The Narration
Mortimer reads his own work, and this is one of those cases where authorial narration genuinely adds something rather than being a vanity project. He brings a donnish warmth to the material – you can hear the pleasure he takes in a particularly odd detail, the slight quickening of pace when he’s onto something that delights him. It’s the audio equivalent of being lectured by an enthusiastic tutor who’s had enough coffee to be genuinely animated but not enough to become incoherent. There’s no theatrical performance; it’s a historian talking to you, and that suits the material perfectly.
What Readers Say
With a perfect 5 out of 5 from six Audible UK listeners, the response has been unanimously warm. One reviewer described it simply as “very interesting take on history,” whilst another noted that “Ian Mortimer’s books cover such detail and is just a mass of interesting information. Good Reading.” Perhaps the most thoughtful response came from historian Sharon Connolly, who’d interviewed Mortimer on her podcast: she praised his “refreshing outlook on History – he not only wants to make it accessible to everyone, he wants to make it enjoyable,” and emphasised his talent for showing history “from different angles.” That assessment is exactly right, and it applies to this book in full.
Who Should Listen?
This is history for people who love history but are tired of being told about the same kings and the same battles. It suits curious generalists, devoted fans of Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides, and anyone who prefers their non-fiction to carry a light touch without sacrificing rigour. It would also work superbly as a commuter listen – each A to Z entry is self-contained enough to enjoy in short bursts between stops. If you want history that makes you feel like you’ve actually been somewhere new, rather than simply read a summary of events, Mortimer is your guide.
Treat yourself to history at its most entertaining – listen to Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History on Audible UK.
