Aan het einde van die dunne dikbedrukte 1.400 pagina's overheerste bij mij dankbaarheid. Ik leef in een zeldzaam vreedzaam tijdperk. I did not enjoy the book itself, but I believe it will add context and depth to future, far more limited, narrations of specific historical events and people. I admire the effort expended to create this vast panorama of mankind. The book achieved it's purpose for me, but significant effort and perseverance were required for me to complete it. This book is like a puzzle. Each family history is a single puzzle piece, with a part of the whole picture on it. You can look briefly at each piece and see what's on it, but its not until you put it all together that you get to see the whole picture. A delightfulworldhistory, told through influential families. . . .Thedevice of weaving togetherthe past usingthemost enduring and essential unit of human relations is inspired. It lets readers empathize with people who helped shape historical events and were shaped bythem. . . .Themethod also allowstheauthor to cover every continent and era, and to give women and even children a voice and presence thatthey tend to be denied in more conventional histories. . . . Despitethebook’s formidable length,there is never a dull moment.Thestory moves at pace across terrible battles, court intrigues, personal triumphs and disasters, lurid sexual practices and hideous tortures. . . .Theauthor tellsthese stories with verve and palpable relish fortheunbridled sex and inventive violence that run throughthem. His character sketches are pithy and witty. . . .Thefootnotes, often short essays inthemselves, havetheacid drollery of Edward Gibbon. . . . Overall this book is a triumph and a delight, an epic that entertains, informs and appalls in enjoyably equal measure.” — TheEconomist

It’s written quite readably, it’s not hard to read, but I can’t say that I really enjoyed it as I might enjoy a good novel. I rather generously award three stars in recognition of the author’s achievement in covering the vast span of world history, and covering people and events on every continent. I rather doubt that I’ll ever reread the whole thing, but I may sometimes use it for reference and dip into 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. Een whopping 1.400 pagina's wereldgeschiedenis. Met duizenden namen. En ja, te veel geschiedenis bestaat. 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 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.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 The book is written in a curious mixture of styles. There is the tabloid argot (“Philadelphos supposedly kept nine paramours, of whom the star was a badass chariot-racing Greek beauty Belistiche.”). And there is a prolific use of genital vocabulary which would never have seen light of day in tabloid publications. But there is also a slightly exhibitionist use of rare words. “Bertie, the twenty-five-year-old pinguid Prince of Wales”, for example. And the Arab world is “fissiparous”. At times, this becomes intrusive and obfuscatory. One chapter contains “frizelate” or various forms of it, in several instances. Neither my collection of dictionaries, nor ChatGPT, recognise this word, although it would seem, from the context, to have some sort of sexual connotation. 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.

Even with the length of this book, the history of the world is sometimes a pretty basic overview. I did like that families are a big part of the narrative. Any section that piques your interest should be followed up by finding other books that go in depth. 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. There’s probably no better person to write a biography of “TV talking head, pop culture conceptualist, entrepreneur and bullshitter” Tony Wilson than Paul Morley, a man who formed an esoteric writing career in his Manchester orbit. Still, Morley immediately understands the pitfalls of this enterprise: he calls Wilson “beautiful, foolish, dogmatic, charming. Impossible.” This moving portrait of Manchester from the late 1970s onwards is richer, more complicated and thoughtful than mere biography; a history, of sorts, of a city long since passed into memory. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’

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. I read The Romanovs a few years ago, and it is still, until this day, one of my favourite Non-Fiction books of all time. This has to do with my obsession with the Romanovs, of course, but also because Simon manages to write utterly entertaining history books... something I did not think anyone was capable of. Gripping. Montefiore’s characters snare our sympathy and we follow them avidly. This intricate at times disturbing, always absorbing novel entertains and disturbs and seethes with moral complexity. Characters real+fictitious ring strikingly true.It is to a large extent Tolstoyan …..” The Australian Because there is was so much information, the brief information we get on each family constantly left me wanting more about each family, some more than others but I was left unsatisfied for the entire book. Yet as I took in these much smaller stories of each family, I started to see a much larger story - the history of humanity. How it all happened, how all the little parts fit together to make a much bigger history. It was pretty incredible. I was able to understand in a much clearer way how things played out over the course of humanity, why things are the way they are now. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’