The author did a good job of explaining things so I could keep track of who's who. And many of his humorous comments were mildly amusing. But he was definitely an iconoclast. His end point was they rulers were just normal people who found themselves in a very powerful position by chance and circumstance. I think his point was to debunk divine right or genetic ability. He also says that the major changes that led to the freedoms enjoyed by British people today (such as they are) came as reactions to bad kings, and that good kings, while they may have kept the kingdom going while they were around, contributed little or nothing to posterity. Hard to argue with that. But he couldn't keep his wokeness out of it—going off on profanity-laced rants about anyone who disagreed with him about, for example, climate change. He also went on a rant about the last Daniel Craig James Bond movie which I happened to agree with, although I got the feeling that he just came up with a bit he thought was clever and decided to shoehorn it in somewhere.