The World: A Family History

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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.’ Nevertheless, there is some very good stuff in Montefiore’s concluding thoughts, making me wish again that he had limited his scope and written three or four more finely targeted studies.

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 “ What I liked most was the choice to jump between concurrent stories. While it may be confusing to some, for me it helped put things in chronological context. I think it’s easy to forget when things happened in relation to each other. I also found the book easy to read, despite the conversational tone getting a little too chummy at times for my taste. The author included information about many women, who are often left out of histories written by men. Visibility was also given to sexual minorities, who have of course existed forever (sometimes with more acceptance than experienced today) despite the beliefs of some modern bigots. Some of the ancient history that was new to me sent me down research rabbit holes.

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We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman I thought this was a good book. But it had so much information in it that eventually I seem to have forgotten what I read. What I found really interesting though was how in the same chapter the author switched from events in one area of the world, like Rome, to another, like China. I loved reading how the different empires interacted and it was so interesting to read what events took place at around the same time.Asian Champions Trophy: Navneet Kaur finds the space, Deepika finds her footing as India down Japan in an entertaining ‘arm-wrestle’ 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. SSM’s evident enjoyment of salacious details – of who chopped the largest number of enemy penises off, or who laid the largest number of concubines or other people’s wives (or husbands) – occasionally obscures other interesting aspects. I enjoyed all the sex and depravity for sure, but I’d have welcomed a bit more on the more boring things they did too. For example, after quite a detailed account of bedroom cavortings in Empress Wei’s court around 85 B.C., a throwaway phrase mentions that these oversexed charmers had also doubled the scale of China’s cultural artefacts and activity. It’s true the book is called a “Family History” and not a “cultural history”, but the mountain of genitalia surely gives a slightly incomplete picture of the ancient world. 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

Award-winning historian and novelist Simon Sebag Montefiore takes the road less travelled for his new book, The World: A Family History, as he tells the story of humanity from prehistory to the present day through the one thing that all humans have in common: family. 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 ScotsmanThis is one large book that begins with mankinds emergence and ends with Biden's election and the Trump MAGA's attempt to overturn that. This book is one of the worst books ever written by a very respected historian. The problem starts quite at the beginning with the title: The World. It is NOT a world history, but the history of the elites and various famous families which ruled the many parts of the world. Thus, if you think that you will find some information or data or anything which describes the everyday life of such and such a group of people who were the common people, you will wait in vain.