TITANS OF HISTORY: THE GIANTS WHO MADE OUR WORLD
A snapshot of some of history’s most famous
Do not judge a book by its cover! This idiom has perhaps never been so true as it is about Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Titans of History. Sadly, while updating this collection of astonishing life stories with new entries on Michelangelo and Simón Bolívar, the publisher seemingly decided to take inspiration from The Guinness Book of Records for its new artwork. Fortunately, the book is everything it’s garish cover is not — a first-class chronology that is smart and exciting.
From Jesus Christ to Genghis Khan, Shakespeare to Einstein, Catherine the Great to Margaret Thatcher, Titans of History features short biographical profiles of them all. A compilation of history’s most influential figures, it’s perhaps no surprise that these tales are packed with heroic acts, monstrous villainy, bloody battles, sparkling intelligence and even sexual thrill-seeking. In short, they are often utterly engrossing. As well as featuring all of
Author Simon Sebag Montefiore Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson Price £13 Released Out now
the big names in history, the collection does an excellent job of filling in the gaps of eras often ignored by the school curriculum, such as Holy Roman emperors and Ottoman sultans.
Sebag Montefiore also manages to cram some critical analysis into his brief biographies — most of the time. A few myths are perpetuated: the pyramids were built by slaves, John I died from eating too many peaches and Edward the Black Prince adopted a blind Bohemian king’s coat of arms after admiring his courage. But these facts are mostly tangential to the broader profiles, so we will let the author off — at least until the next revised edition.
Titans of History is written in such a way that you can dip in and out of it to just read specific profiles if you like. However, it is arranged chronologically, so reading it in order helps you understand how the lives of historical figures overlapped and how events unfolded differently around the world simultaneously.