“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”
A Little History of the World is, I think, one of the books I’ve been unknowingly waiting to read my entire life. A friend gifted it to me for my birthday last month, but it wasn’t until Friday just passed that I first picked it up. To be perfectly honest, I was slightly sceptical at first; I love learning about history, but finding a book that just explains things without getting bogged down in dates and times and names of places, people and battles (gosh the battles), can be difficult. I’m terrible with dates and I’m not so hot on names either so you can see why many a standard history text and I would fail to get along. And it was because of this that my initial reaction to A Little History, along with my friend’s prediction that reading it was going to change the way I saw the world, was perhaps one of amused dubiety, rather than giddy enthusiasm.
Well you know what? She only done and proved me wrong.
This book is amazing. It is beautiful. It is all kinds of wonderfully enriching, life-affirming awesomeness. I read the whole thing in four days straight and by the time I reached the end I was sobbing and wishing we could carry on some more. Reading this book is like drinking warm milk while listening to a bedtime story, read to you by someone who wants nothing more than for you to enjoy learning. From the sacred rituals of the ancient Egyptians to the glory of the Italian renaissance to the reasoned thinkers of the Enlightenment, Gombrich literally pieces together the jigsaw of the world’s history right before your very eyes. As I read, I almost physically felt a whole bunch of abstract names of places and people I’d half-learned about at school slot into a context that I could actually understand without once wanting to stop for a cold drink and a lie down. My patchy, pathetic knowledge of what happened when and who was responsible for it has undergone the most magical transformation in the space of only four days, and while I probably still couldn’t reel off many dates, I really do feel like I finally have some actual knowledge of how and why the world came to be the way it is. Amazing, non?
Of course it helps that A Little History is intended to be read by children. Gombrich was invited to complete the manuscript in 1935 after giving an unfavourable review to another writer’s draft. He had just six weeks until submission when he agreed to take the project on, a timetable that propelled him into penning a chapter pretty much every single day. As a consequence of the short period of time in which the book was written, as well as its intended purpose and audience, it is pleasingly free of references, footnotes and other distractions. In fact, it really is told like a story. A really rich, exciting story, full of interesting characters, wonderful adventures and jaw-dropping scandals. And the best bit? It’s all freaking true. Every word of it.
But as well as providing a guide to the what, where and when, Gombrich’s book is a surprisingly rich source of little bits and pieces of information that I could quite easily have lived my whole life without ever knowing, but that I’m really glad I did learn. Like how the urgent quest of an unnamed messenger from Greece gave us the word ‘marathon’ that we still use to describe a run of 26 miles’ length. Or how the West Indies is so called because Christopher Columbus misjudged the size of the earth and thought he had sailed right round it and arrived on the West coast of India instead of in the middle of the Caribbean. And it doesn’t stop at these joyful little quirks of language. Reading about the countless battles, the innocent suffering and the abject misery through which so many of our ancestors lived (and in which, let’s not forget, so many people in the world continue to live) really encouraged me to think about and appreciate just how bizarrely amazing life is for us. It’s true. The 21st century affords us riches of the kind that many of the people who came before us could never even have dreamed about. Warm, secure, comfortable living spaces? A solid meal every single night? Freedom to read books, take walks, socialise, work, marry and reproduce, all without fear of imminent death owing to disease, war, famine or even just the whimsy of authority? That stuff is pretty brilliant when you come to think about it. Definitely something to remember the next time you find yourself huffing because the milk has gone sour.
The other thought that came over me as I finished the book was just how many people lived, loved, fought and died during the making of the world’s history. Legions of people from all over the Earth, each one given what is in history’s eyes no more than a passing glance at life here before passing on to who knows where. Soldiers and farmers, kings and seamstresses, philosophers and factory workers, each life lived no more than a tiny fleck of colour in the painting of the story of the world. And we are the same. We live, we love, we toil and we die. A depressing thought perhaps, but reading A Little History of the World made me feel blessed to have been given my passing glance, and excited at the prospect of enjoying it. As Gombrich put it: “what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that moment. It is worth the effort.”
So, Gombrich. Read it. Buy a copy for a friend. Perhaps even let it change the way you think. Above all, let it make you thankful for your passing glance at life.
in the warmth and snugness of my sofa nest while eating home made scones with jam. Joy. Here are the rest of my highlights from the past week…
