The World: A Family History

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Thus, it’s a tale of sex and violence; rather like reading a long historical novel with far too many characters, no coherent plot, and no neat beginning or end. Of course, it starts more or less at the beginning of recorded history, and finishes at the present. 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 The cookie is set by CloudFlare service to store a unique ID to identify a returning users device which then is used for targeted advertising. The Dutch traders of the VOC had founded Cape Town, where they settled thousands of poor Boers – farmers, devout Calvinists – who soon encountered the hunter-gatherer Khoikhoi (Bushmen or Hottentots to the Europeans), descended from the original inhabitants of the continent, pushed southwards by the Bantu who migrated from west Africa. The Dutch imported slaves from Dahomey, Angola and Mozambique to work their plantations while breaking the Khoikhoi, who, crushed between Bantu and Dutch, decimated by smallpox and reduced to indentured labour close to slavery, almost ceased to exist. The settlers, who called themselves Afrikaners, expanded northwards and eastwards, thus encountering the Nguni, herders of long-horned cattle, who were moving south conquering their own kingdoms.

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. We don't appear again until the late 20th century when non-contextualised "Irish" terrorists threaten the UK, a country he never explains the origins of, though to be fair, there were other things going on in 1800-01. Even though he explains the origins of two of the last three US Presidents in some detail but neglects to say how Joe Biden's ancestors ended up in the US. He does say something about the Kennedys though not where they came from originally. 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 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. I should mention, though, that Montefiore has provided an extensive reading list online, a resource which is vastly under-utilised by authors of history books; many would greatly benefit from the possibility of providing online many more photographs, illustrations and maps than are practicably available in a bound book.I have mixed feelings about this type of History as it pays so little attention to the great majority of people who have ever lived, though the figures at the top who make the important decisions are often fascinating figures in their own right and a lot of social/economic history can be deathly dull and of little interest to the regular reader. Hopelessly romantic and hopelessly moving. A mix of lovestory thriller and historical fiction. Engrossing." The Observer 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. Another aspect of this is his custom of blithely suggesting he is the only historian to have recognised or understood some particular matter. “Western history writing often…” or “This is much neglected by historians” he laments, without naming the errant scholars. From the master storyteller and internationally bestselling author – the story of humanity from prehistory to the present day, told through the one thing all humans have in common: family.

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 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 TelegraphWhen I see film of someone climbing the outside of a skyscraper (this is “buildering”, apparently), I am amazed at the audacity of their enterprise, and I am confronted with the reality that, whatever my skills are, they would not include this activity. Yet I wonder at their purpose and find no convincing answer to the question of what has been gained by the successful completion of the exercise. 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.

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. On the other hand though, it’s worth recording that SSM does perform a kind of service through all the schoolboy chortling. If the book is a bit light on man’s spiritual journey in ancient times, it’s clear enough that most other historians have failed to convey what obsessive and saucy boys and girls we have always been, everywhere. It is simply amazing how many different cultures were fixated on genitalia. From “Abarsam [who] had himself castrated and sent his testicles to the king in a box of salt – surely an example of protesting too much”. to ”After [Andonilos] had been hung upside down in the Hippodrome, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals amputated, his teeth extracted, his face burned..” At heart, though, my objection to The World: A Family History is more substantial than these points. I would describe SSM’s approach to the work as being, essentially, salacious tabloid. It is a conglomeration of gory violence; sexual activity, particularly favouring slightly eccentric varieties, and rape; excessive alcohol and drug-usage; and general scatology. (It is something of a paradox, then, that he describes Martin Luther as “fixated on faeces and sex”, the “faecal fulminator”.) I should mention that Montefiore also enjoys describing the appearance of misshapen or disfigured individuals. And there are many times when trivial information is included amongst the omission of significant historical events. Thus a whole paragraph is dedicated to details of “Haroun’s wedding to his double first cousin Zubaida (which) was said to have been the greatest party of all time” in 1782. The biggest strength is the authors passion and writing style. Montefiore does not shy away from details. Gruesome executions, sexual passion, and affairs of state are all laid out here. This book is not for the faint of heart, most of human history is violent, and its on display here. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie.

Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us.

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 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. 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.It was partly to counter the genocidal implications of nationalism that, in 1955, MoMA’s photography curator Edward Steichen launched “The Family of Man,” a major exhibition designed to showcase “the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” The trouble is that even the most intimately connected human family can divide against itself. In the final days of the Soviet Union, Montefiore recounts, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker discussed the possibility of war in Ukraine with a member of the Politburo. The Soviet official observed that Ukraine had twelve million Russians and many were in mixed marriages, “so what kind of war would that be?” Baker told him, “A normal war.” 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. One element of this study which I think is very valuable is its concomitant examination of many regions, showing the apposition of events in North and South America, Europe, East and West Asia and, at times, the Pacific. Conventional histories generally tend to be based around a nation or region, and it is useful to remember that, at any one time, life was progressing in many different places on the earth. This work attempts to avoid that oversight, although, of course, some regions are overlooked as we dart about the globe. It would simply not be possible to be completely comprehensive. And at times, one theatre and set of actors is dismissed rather abruptly, to be replaced by another. But it is a valuable development at least to show major concurrent Asian, European and North and South American events. This, however, is a separate issue from doing that for the whole span of history. 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 The cookie is set by CasaleMedia. The cookie is used to collect information about the usage behavior for targeted advertising.