Simon Sebag Montefiore - The World - A Family History (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022) *****

An insane undertaking, an incredibly ambitious project, a brilliant achievement and an exceptional read. 

Readers - exhausted, crushed, enlightened - will look at the world and history through a different lens after having read this book. Its author - Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of the equally excellent "Jerusalem, a Biography" - introduces you in a very personal way to the individuals and their families that shaped our history, from the very first days up to the corona crisis and the invasion of Ukraine. 

He describes all major civilisations from a same time perspective across the globe, bundled in chapters based on the number of inhabitants in the world. The sources used to write this book are so abundant - another 137 pages - that the actual bibliography of the book is to be found on his website instead of the book itself. 

Sebag Montefiore is a born story-teller, with an excellent feeling for keeping the reader interested in his "characters" and the great plot of history. The book starts with the story of Enheduanna, living 4,000 years ago, princess of the Akkadian empire, daughter of Sargon the Great, who wrote a sad verse of how she was raped by a raiding rebel: "he dared approach me in his lust", a vivid angle of approach to start with the history of humanity, then jumping back a few million years to prehistory to take you along on this fascinating and horrific journey. The story sets the scene for the entire book: a journalistic style of writing: direct, personal, empathic, with a great sense of using the right anecdotes and quotes to bring otherwise boring historical processes to life. 

These distant rulers whom we know - and mostly not - from our history books and history lessons, whose conquests and treaties and wars we may remember, now come to life as if you're part of the events. Sebag Montefiore offers all the personal information that no history teacher would ever (dare) serve you: the power struggles among kings, emperors and presidents, the ruthless extermination of rivals and family members, the power-hungry warlords, whose only interest is their own personal gain, honour and lust. He writes about the dynasties of ancient Egypt, China, Africa and the Americas, about siblings killing each other with cunning, lists or brute force. It seems as if the author enjoys the cruelty and the lust, as if this is a historical gossip colum, but gradually you come to understand that this was - and probably to a large extent still is - the standard practice of how countries are ruled. Human life to many of these leaders is without any value. People are just pawns on their own personal chessboard, and the colour of the pawn does not matter, whether it's the adversary's or your own. 

Here are some random examples, taken for each 100th page in the book: 

• "Berenice solved the problem in family style. Bursting into the maternal boudoir with her posse of killers, she surprised her husband and her mother in bed. Berenice killed her husband, spared her mother and then proceeded triumphantly to Alexandria to marry Euergetes" (p. 100)

• "Shah Khusrau II arrived in Roman territory. The grandson of the Immortal, he was just twenty when a coup against his inept father brought him to the throne, but he had already shown his mettle running Iranian Armenia. His father was blinded then strangled by his voracious uncles, but as generals bid for power, young Kliusrau escaped, accompanied by Shirin, his 'extremely beautiful' Christian queen, and aided by her fellow Christian, the Arab king al-Numan." (p. 200)

• "Blonde and blue-eyed with 'flowing hair and white shoulders', Wal­lada enjoyed a rare life for an Islamic woman in Corboda, now ruled by noble clans. No longer secluded in the Umayya harem, independently wealthy, she appeared in public, wearing silks that showed off her beauty and her figure, recited her poetry in public, competing against men in poetry contests, and set up a school for female poets. She flaunted her lovers. When the religious authorities grumbled, she had lines of poems defiantly written on her dresses: 'I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.' Around 1031, she fell in love with an aristocratic vizier, Ibn Zaydun.(...) Ibn Zaydun turned nasty, writing to Wallada, 'You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the ­crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.' Wallada got her revenge exposing his affairs with slave boys: 

Because of his love for rods in trousers, Ibn Zaydun,

In spite of his excellence

If he would see a penis in a palm tree

He would turn into a woodpecker" (p. 300)

• (On the slave trade) "'It's not their religion but humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings,' wrote a witness, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, royal archivist and Henry's biographer. 'To increase their sufferings still more they now began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from brothers ... ' Much of the slave trade had originally been by demand for domestic slaves who joined family households. Now at the birth of Atlantic slavery, slave traders captured entire families, then tore them apart. Slavery was an anti-familial institution. This small scene, filled with cruelty, hypocrisy and avarice, was the beginning industry that would sweeten European palates and poison socie­ty for centuries. (p.400) 

• "As the Islamic millennium got closer, he (Akbar) called himself the Mahdi or Renewer of the Second Millennium. In 1585, he minted coins that read 'Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu', which would usually mean 'God is great' but could also mean 'Akbar is God', as he toyed with substituting himself for Muhammad. He pulled back from his own apotheosis, but projected the sanctity of Mughal monarchy, promoting himself as Tamerlanian padishah, Islamic saintly ruler and Hindu chakravartin. (...) As energetic sexually as in all things, he insisted on having the wives of his amirs if he fancied them, and his demands for new girls were 'a great terror ... in the city'. Like all the steppe monarchs, however, he consulted wise women in the family, particularly his senior wife and first cousin, Ruqaiya". (p.500)

• "In 1611, Artemisia Gen­tileschi, seventeen years old and a virgin with curly auburn hair, full lips and a wide face, was painting with the artist Agosti­no Tassi, twenty years older, when he and a male helper raped her, aided by a female tenant. Tassi, who had been tried for incest and would later be tried for trying to kill a pregnant courtesan, promised marriage but then changed his mind, at which her father brought charges. Gentileschi had to relive the agony by giving testimony. Tassi, devious and violent, tried to suborn witnesses and taint her as a whore. Astonishingly, she was then taken to visit Tassi in prison and tortured with a thumbscrew to test her veracity. 'E vero, e vero, e vero,' she repeated. 'It's true!' 'You're lying in your throat,' Tassi shouted. He was found guilty, but his sentence was later overturned." (p.600)

... you get the gist. Juicy stories, lots of quotes, very personal anecdotes as if you're witnessing the action yourself, and deepening the interest in these incredible amounts of characters whose names you risk to forget once the page has been turned. A quick calculation: there's an index of 37 pages with on average 40 names per page, which means that there are about 1,500 characters in the novel of our history. 

The amount of information you get to absorb is enormous, humongous, colossal, gigantic and immense. In one word: monumental. This may seem terrifying at first, but the writing is so good that you just keep reading. Our history is fascinating, gruesome, horrifying, and yes, there are major shifts in history that led to change, such as climate change, trade routes, technological inventions, and religions, but the main drivers from what we understand are the egos and personalities of individuals, most of whom seem to have considered themselves as unique, irreplacable, geniuses and even divine, while from reading the book you can only see them - with today's Western eyes - as pathological, narcissistic power-hungry megalomaniacs. 

The paradox of the book is that while it's all-encompassing, it's also intimate and personal, it's grand and detailed, it's detached with balanced observations from a political and cultural perspective yet with an often understandable and human appreciation or disapproval of the behaviours of the protagonists, making it objective and subjective at the same time. 

Simon Sebag Montefiori has been smart enough to guide us through this shocking narrative with sub-chapters that come with attractive titles that make you want to read further. In this sense, the writing is closer to journalism than to scientific historical writing. It's as entertaining as it is instructive. 

The effort to have collected all this is by itself hard to imagine, but to write it with such enthousiasm, with such sustained controlled and well-paced quality of writing till the 1262nd page is even more astonishing. 

An easy contender for the non-fiction book of the year.