Is now the most exciting point in human history?

Yuval Noah Harari has sold more than 45 million books in 65 languages. He is a professor with a PhD from the University of Oxford, has spoken at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and his latest book, Nexus, is considered ‘erudite, provocative and entertaining’ by Rory Stewart and ‘thought-provoking and so very well reasoned’ by Stephen Fry.

This is the story the book’s cover tells us about its contents, and Nexus itself argues that it is stories which are fundamental to shaping the world. It posits that the strength of humanity comes from building large networks in which we work together co-operatively, but that our weakness is that once we have amassed power this way, we use it unwisely. Information lets us pull together these powerful networks; but information is not based on sharing facts or things that are true so much as on building a shared story.

Gradually new communications technologies increased the group that could share the narrative: print allowed a story to spread, largely unchanged, through books.