.... 1066 and all this?

    E. O. Parrott, ed. The Dogsbody Papers (1988) What’s a dogsbody, you ask? The guy who has to do the work that’s not glamourous or important enough for the glamorous and important people to do. A factotum. A drudge. The one without whom the house would turn into a garbage dump. The necessary worker that the important people don’t notice. Hence the one who can collect and preserve the evidence of what really happened, such as diaries, unpublished poems, drafts of speeches, fragments of joke books, etc. We see bits of history that the official record omits.
     The Dogsbody clan is found worldwide, in all social strata. The age of the lineage is uncertain,. However, palaeontology provides evidence that it originated before recorded history. We owe the record of the discovery of the wheel to the scratchings of one Ugg Dugg Budd, ca 15,000 B.C.E.
     This book is a compendium of such ephemera. Nicely decorated by W. F. N. Watson, including facsimiles of oddments such as broadsheets and manuscript illuminations. If you have a reasonable grasp of history, it will amuse you. If not, you may be puzzled why I rate it ****.