Clara’s Verdict
Ian Mortimer does something genuinely clever here: he reframes an entire historical era as a traveller’s guide, and in doing so forces the reader to ask questions that conventional history rarely bothers to pose. What would you eat? Where would you sleep? Who would you trust, and how would you know? The conceit sounds gimmicky but it emphatically is not – it gives the writing a propulsive, practical energy that most popular history books entirely lack. I have reviewed hundreds of historical non-fiction audiobooks over the years, and this one stands apart for the sheer ingenuity of its approach. Mortimer is not simply recounting what happened; he is asking what it felt like from the inside, and that shift in vantage point transforms the material.
This is the second volume in his Time Traveller’s Guides series, following the acclaimed medieval England instalment, and while some readers find the earlier book marginally more vivid – the medieval period offers more dramatic contrast with modern life – this one holds its own as a serious, accessible piece of historical writing dressed in an irresistible costume. The result earned a Waterstones selection and stands as one of the more creative approaches to popular Elizabethan history you will find.
About the Audiobook
What was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a visitor to late sixteenth-century England would ask.
Mortimer ranges across the whole of Elizabeth I’s reign and the whole gamut of Elizabethan life – geography and topography, changes in architecture, shifts in wealth and class, the arts, religion, food, dress and disease. He does not shy away from the darker corners: the executions, the religious persecution, the endemic poverty that sat just beneath the gilded surface of an age we too readily romanticise. Nor does he ignore the genuine achievements – the literary explosion of Marlowe and Shakespeare, the maritime ambition of Drake and Raleigh, the emergence of a recognisably modern English identity. The period was both magnificent and brutal, and Mortimer holds that contradiction without trying to resolve it into something more comfortable. This is book 2 in Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides series. The audiobook runs to 17 hours and 59 minutes – a substantial but never exhausting listen.
The Narration
Mike Grady narrates the audiobook, and it is a pairing that works well. Grady brings a warm, measured quality to Mortimer’s prose – clear and unhurried, with enough character to hold attention across the almost eighteen-hour runtime without ever becoming monotonous or affecting. He handles the descriptive passages with the right kind of steady authority, and the more dramatic moments – plague, execution, the chaos of Elizabethan street life – with appropriate weight. For a book that depends so heavily on its ability to transport the listener into a vanished world, the narration is as much part of the experience as the writing itself, and Grady rises to that responsibility. Those who have listened to the medieval volume with the same narrator will find the same reliable quality here.
What Readers Say
The response from listeners has been consistently enthusiastic. One reviewer called it “a highly entertaining, fascinating and very readable book – the closest thing we will ever get to an understanding of what it would have been like to live in the reign of Elizabeth I, short of actual time travel.” Another praised “the style of writing as totally engaging, very easy to lose yourself in the world being described.” Several readers who came to the book after watching the BBC television series noted that the book offers considerably more depth and detail than the adaptation could provide. More measured voices observed that the Elizabethan volume is “a little dry in places” compared to the medieval predecessor, a criticism that seems fair: the Tudor period, for all its drama, lacks some of the alien strangeness that makes medieval daily life so immediately arresting. The audiobook holds a rating of 4.4 out of 5 on Audible.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone with an interest in Tudor England, popular history, or the kind of immersive historical writing that reads more like a journey than a lecture. Mortimer’s approach will particularly appeal to those who have bounced off dry academic prose but want something with real scholarly depth beneath the accessible surface. Fans of the BBC series of the same name will find the book a more detailed and nuanced companion. If you have already enjoyed the medieval England volume, this is an obvious next step. If you have not, consider beginning there and working forward in time – the contrast between the two periods is itself instructive. Available on Audible UK, and also accessible via Kobo and Scribd for those who prefer subscription services.
Listen to The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England on Audible UK
