‘Unruly’ by David Mitchell
I picked this up after my wife finished it. As I did, she told me that she had enjoyed it, but couldn’t remember anything about it. I concur with that. It’s fairly engaging and your enjoyment will largely depend on your tolerance for Mitchell’s tone, which I assume everyone is familiar with by now. Some bits that I marked out, because I knew I wouldn’t remember them at the time:
That's what 'chantries' were - big expensive religious buildings which rich people funded so that thousands of monk-hours would be put into praying for their souls, thus making sure they evaded hell and sped through purgatory, straight to lovely heaven where they'd presumably then bump into all the other rich nobles they were already accustomed to socializing with.
The idea behind porphyrogeniture was that, even better than being the first-born male of the previous king, was being born while your father was already king - ‘in the purple’.
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