content: Manchester's style may be entertaining (though not all readers seem to agree even on that), but what he says is flat-out wrong. He admits in the introduction that he doesn't know anything about the Middle Ages and didn't bother to find out; it goes downhill from there.Some previous reviews allege that Manchester didn't mean to write a "scholarly" (by which they seem to mean "boring") book. That may be so; but even popular history has to get the basic facts right. If you're off by a hundred years in important dates (like the writing of "The Canterbury Tales"), if you fail to read any of the past century of scholarship on your subject, if you misrepresent reality, that is not "fun" history; it's simply a crock.