One of the joys of reading a work like this is to catch glimpses of the author behind the history

The most ambitious task for any historian is to write a “History of the World.” It’s ludicrously massive in scope, requiring both encyclopedic knowledge and a discerning ability to select the right stories to tell and arguments to make. This is the task that Conrad Black has set for himself in his new book The Political and Strategic History of the World.

Right away you can see how he’s trying to make things more manageable: by offering not a history of world cultures or societies but instead a narrative of politics and war. He certainly has given himself plenty of space in which to make it happen. This 1000 page book that takes us from antiquity up to 14 AD. It is the first of an anticipated three volumes.

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It is not as insurmountable a mission as it may seem at first. Possibly the most important history book of the last decade was Yuval Noah Harrari’s Sapiens, a brilliant and original take on what makes humanity distinct. It’s a text that roves over everything from prehistoric political organization to the place of religion in human society, and offering original arguments such as the one where he says it was actually humans and not plants and animals that were domesticated with the agricultural revolution. He distils the essence of the capitalist revolution in a short, sharp chapter that explains why early modern bankers were much happier to loan their money to the tiny Dutch republic rather than the powerful absolutist Spanish King, and why this matters. Harrari’s book travels at 30,000 ft in the air, allowing you to survey the entire landscape, and then dipping down to........

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