The World: A Family History

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In summary then, PMS’s romp is fun and helps depict an interconnected world since the beginning of history. But in jumping around like an energetic grasshopper he makes it quite difficult to follow, and you will need to read a more considered history of any particular period, to make real sense of it. Reading this book without any prior knowledge of Irish History one would come away with the conclusion that the most significant thing that happened in Ireland in the 1840s (or any other time between the late 17th and late 20th centuries) was that an aristocratic lady called Eliza Lynch changed her name to Lola Montez and seduced the mad King of Bavaria. Interestingly, he describes an earlier visitor to a Central European Court, Edward Kelly as being an "Earless Irish Necromancer" though he was born in Gloucester and little is known of his ancestry.

In all honestly, nothing I say can possibly do justice to the immeasurable hard work of the author and every single person involved in bringing this book to life. I feel nothing but profound respect and admiration for this unbelievably relevant and crucial book, even more so because, despite its intimidating length and density, it is full of good humour.

Gripping and cleverly plotted. Doomed love at the heart of a violent society is the heart of Montefiore's One Night in Winter... depicting the Kafkaesque labyrinth into which the victims stumble." The Sunday Times References to Jewish history seem to me to be out of proportion (and references to modern Israel are surely anodyne in contrast to the scathing critique applied to other nations.) On occasion, the references to the West display the contemporary predilection for showing the West it is not as smart, creative, powerful, etc as it is presumed to think it is. This is one of those tedious fashionable tropes which intend to show the author as a bit cleverer than hoi polloi. Montefiore also insists, despite all his examples of egregious slavery carried out in many countries at many times, that US slavery was the worst of them all. And he pontificates against incest, I think misrepresenting the likelihood of birth defects in offspring. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. This crappy app ate my previous review as I was most of the way through it. Ugh. This was a very long book and I don’t want to spend much more time on it, so I’ll try to keep it brief this time as this review is just for my own notes anyway. In a fifty-year reign (it ended in 1870), Moshoeshoe defeated the British, Afrikaners, Zulus and Ndebele. More humane and constructive than Shaka, he was ‘majestic and benevolent. His aquiline profile, the fullness and regularity of his features, his eyes a little weary made a deep impression upon me,’ wrote Casalis. ‘I felt at once I was dealing with a superior man, trained to think, to command others and, above all, himself.’ Out of these wars emerged the present shape of southern Africa.

I am not sure what the purpose is of trying to consolidate history of all earth in a single book. Is it a bit like climbing mountains – or buildings – to show he can do it? I felt at many times during the expedition that this was essentially a vanity project. Finally, one technical angle which is a serious shortcoming and which the publisher needs to remedy: SSM inserts a large number of additional footnotes/endnotes, asterisked and assembled at the end of each chapter in my electronic version. Many are quite fascinating and well worth reading – but it is frequently difficult to work out which comment at the end relates to which asterisk in the body of the text, as his additional remarks often illustrate a point by going off at a slight tangent. That is a pity, as it disrupts the flow of his narrative quite significantly to hunt through and work out which bit applies to whom. In a book where it is already quite difficult to work out which country/person he is talking about, It would have been more of a romp if the footnotes/endnotes had been numbered instead of asterisked: you would know immediately where you were. In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world's great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama.This is world history on the most grand and intimate scale – spanning centuries, continents and cultures, and linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology to the people at the centre of the human drama. The novel is hugely romantic. His ease with the setting and historical characters is masterly. The book maintains a tense pace. Uniquely terrifying. Heartrending. Engrossing. " The Scotsman And I found very interesting his contention that, at the time of Boris Yeltsin’s demise, the US would have been better served in the long term by offering a sort of Marshall Plan to Russia instead of seeking to buy off the satellite Soviet states.

Succession meets Game of Thrones.”— The Spectator•“The author brings his cast of dynastic titans, rogues and psychopaths to life…An epic that both entertains and informs.”— The Economist, Best Books of the Year Another fascinating aspect (for me) was the placing in a wider context of the great empires of old. In the west we have all possibly tended to assume/learn that the Egyptian, Roman, and Chinese empires were the colossal edifices in history, gigantic peaks that loomed over anything else for centuries. I exaggerate a little maybe. But SSM makes no attempt to sex them up in such a way, describing them instead in the same level terms as all the others – the Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, Hittites and so on – and to my mind makes it all the better for that. The mountain range was bigger than one might think. Another of my private prejudices that crumbled is the sense that mighty China has somehow always been a separate planet, with its own civilisation remote and disconnected from the rest of us. To a large degree this is probably true enough: but it is fascinating to deduce from the text that China, with its several incursions into Turkic areas and vice versa, was a more active participant in world history than I had imagined. Xi’s Belt and Road initiative is not quite as precedent-setting as one might think. Neither, perhaps, is the Chinese civilisation quite so ground-breaking as the Chinese would have us believe.The appeal of such chronicles has something to do with the way they schematize history in the service of a master plot, identifying laws or tendencies that explain the course of human events. Western historians have long charted history as the linear, progressive working out of some larger design—courtesy of God, Nature, or Marx. Other historians, most influentially the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun, embraced a sine-wave model of civilizational growth and decline. The cliché that “history repeats itself” promotes a cyclical version of events, reminiscent of the Hindu cosmology that divided time into four ages, each more degenerate than the last. Alan Moore’s first short story collection covers 35 years of what The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s author calls his “ludicrous imaginings”. Across these nine stories, some of which can barely be called short, there’s a wonderful commitment to fantastical events in mundane towns. His old comic fans might enjoy What We Can Know About Thunderman the most, a spectacular tirade against a superhero industry corrupted from such lofty, inventive beginnings. The World: A Family History

Seriously good fun... the Soviet march on Berlin, nightmarish drinking games at Stalin's countryhouse, the magnificence of the Bolshoi, interrogations, snow, sex and exile... lust adultery and romance. Eminently readable and strangely affecting." Sunday Telegraph Montefiore’s] major achievement is to make us seetheworldthrough a different lens – to maketheunfamiliar familiar and, more important,thefamiliar unfamiliar. . . . [B]rings [history] most vividly, almost feverishly, to life.There is hardly a dull paragraph.” ― TheSpectator A staggering achievement. Simon Sebag Montefiore has given us a tremendous gift: a pulsingly readable world history through the millennia and from one end of the globe to the other.” —Sir Simon Schama, author of The Story of the Jews I wouldn’t have persevered with it but for the fact that this is all history, it really happened, which makes it sufficiently interesting that I managed to read it from cover to cover, though in fairly small doses, so it took me almost two months to finish it. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.The Romanovs' is his latest history book. He has now completed his Moscow Trilogy of novels featuring Benya Golden and Comrade Satinov, Sashenka, Dashka and Fabiana.... and Stalin himself. There are 4 sub-themes, at least 4 that I identified: History of Slavery, History of the Jewish people, Art/Music History, and Factoids. I learned much about these topics and enjoyed the footnotes throughout. I thank the author for writing this book. I cannot imaged the time and painstaking effort it took to write. It is a gift to all that read it.