First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the World. Then there was H.G.Wells, who cut a swathe through the high-minded girl intellectuals of the early 20th century, a new species, before writing The Outline of History. World history and women may sound an odd pairing, but they seem to go together. For now there is Andrew Marr, who, after apologising in the papers for his misdemeanours, has written A History of the World. And when you have stopped sniggering consider this: it is a wonderful book.
Forget the series that accompanies it, with the inevitable gory re-enactments on which television insists; also Alexander the Great astride Bucephalus, his stirrups flashing in the sunlight, though it would be 1,000 years before these reached Macedonia. Marr himself pointedly writes: ‘His cavalry fought in a V-formation without stirrups,’ which makes it seem as though the author and the presenter were two different men. Forget all these, for the series is nothing special.
But the book is, and is startlingly different; here Marr’s writing and his control of the material are remarkable. It should be required reading for all students of history, even more so for those who teach it in universities.
My daughter read history at York. That is, in one year she studied Robin Hood, King Arthur and Joan of Arc, in another Ivan the Terrible, the Tudors, and, if I remember aright, the first world war. ‘I hardly knew whether I was coming or going, or when.’ As the director of the National Trust said recently, the young emerge not knowing what joined historical topics or even what order they came in.
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