Moving swiftly on . . .

Titles that begin with the phrase A Brief History of … are no doubt written that way to connote a certain sense of humility, as if the author has been engaged in a casual endeavour and can offer no guarantee that the results will be definitive. The roots of this trend go a few decades back, when titles beginning with the oak-ribbed phrase The History of … — the kind of title that condemned Edward Gibbon to 12 years of writing and his readers to six volumes of reading — were gradually outnumbered by titles beginning with the rather more plastic A History of …. It was all but inevitable that someone would eventually spot the benefits that an adjective like ‘Brief’ could bring to the mix.

But Gibbon was then, and this is now; few modern readers are aristocrats with surplus time on their hands. Brief histories have won their place, although one might suspect that A Brief History of the Human Race is braver than most in its apparent willingness to condense staggering spans of time into a book of not even 400 pages — a little like handing someone a ‘small glass of ocean’. But Michael Cook is a disciplined writer. He doesn’t try to compress events; instead, he surveys at a high remove the 10,000 years of relative warmth known as the Holocene — ‘the window of opportunity for the making of history’, he calls it — by confidently separating the world into its major civilisations, and swooping down on each of them in turn.

Cook introduces each civilisation with a summary of its geography and climate, sketching out its physical situation much as Plato did when he described the ancient Mediterranean states as so many ‘frogs around a pool’, and moves on to discuss the larger themes of history that are demonstrated in it.