My friend Ruby recently started a TikTok channel called ‘Too Long Didn’t Read’. With boundless enthusiasm and a colourful wardrobe, she prances around Hampstead Heath, summarising classic novels in 60 seconds. The channel ‘sums up anything ever written so you can talk about it to your mates’.
Ruby is not alone in her approach of offering such educational digests. Scan the tables at Hatchards in Piccadilly and you will find endless shortest histories, or – for brevity’s sake – ‘shistories’. Popular formulas include ‘The Shortest History of …’, ‘A Brief History of … or ‘A Little History of …’.
New publications include The Shortest History of Scandinavia by Mart Kuldkepp, professor of Estonian and Nordic history at UCL (out in hardback next month), and Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music (out in paperback in July). In it, Ford acknowledges the limitations of the format: ‘No history of music – let alone the shortest – can hope to be comprehensive.’ Ford’s answer to this dilemma is to focus on specific episodes that tell the macro-story.
Which brings us to the sister genre, ‘list-ories’, which neatly packages history into numbered lists. This week’s Sunday Times non-fiction chart features two examples: A History of Britain in Ten Enemies by Terry Deary and A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge. As the author of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, I am fully complicit in this epidemic.
These sorts of books sell, which is why publishers churn them out. The question, though, is why readers are so drawn to such bare-bones history. The primary reason is ease. Short histories serve as cheat sheets in the quest for self-improvement.
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