The history of the world in bloodshed and megalomania

It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history of the whole world then Simon Sebag-Montefiore must be as good a candidate to write it as anyone. He would seem to have read pretty well everything that has ever been written, visited everywhere of historical interest on the planet and enjoyed – thanks to Covid and lockdown – the time to write the one book that he has always had in his sights.

The only history we ‘adore’, Chairman Mao reckoned (and he ought to know), is the history of wars, and in The World: A Family History Sebag-Montefiore has taken the message to heart. There may well be the odd family in which brothers do not routinely strangle each other, children do not blind their parents or parents wipe out their heirs; there may even be families who’d rather build a loft extension than a tower of severed heads, but if there are any such there’s not much sign of them here.

‘Family,’ Sebag-Montefiore writes with Mao in mind, has always been ‘at the mercy of power’, and this is a book about power, and only then about the great dynasties that wielded it. There is the occasional oasis of calm and sanity among the mayhem, but the author’s ‘World’ is unashamedly the world of Game of Thrones, one of rising and falling kingdoms and empires, of battles, sieges, torture, madness, rapine and – a disturbing speciality of his – executions of an ever more obscene kind.

‘House Alara’ (Nubian Kush), ‘House Tilgeth-Pilaser’ (Assyria) – even the chapter headings are early nods in the direction of Game of Thrones, and the only surprise in a history that runs from the first murderous hominids down to Putin, Kim and Assad is that ‘House Lannister’ or ‘Baratheon’ are missing.