The World: A Family History

Reviews

M. Schnee

I’ve only just received The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore and have been enjoying it since. I hope you find my review helpful. The focus on family also makes it possible to pay more attention to the lives of women and children, both of whom were slighted in the books I read as a schoolboy. It is highly addictive.

Gazza

Sebag Montefiore shows off his best talent : blending human virtues and evils together in a stormy, addictive painting. He sketches personalities so vividly that it is very difficult to let go of his writing. A superbly organized, energetic, humane, gripping chronicle of the human race .

An excellent book. He paints a colourful picture of wars and conquests; of grand visions, of the advances and limitations of rulers; of remarkable people and mostly remarkable families.

Sebag Montefiore takes us through the psychology of the great rulers with both meticulous intimacy and grand theatrical sensibility. The author writes in the Introduction:‘Unlike many of the histories that I grew up with, this is a genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe but rather giving Asia, Africa and the Americas the attention they deserve. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind’s experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity’s achievements and an acute witness to its frailties.