A history of the world - Andrew Marr

Our understanding of world history is changing, as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey, Andrew Marr revisits the traditional epic stories, from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon, but frames them with less familiar stories, from Peru to the Ukraine, China to the Caribbean, finding surprising echoes and parallels across vast distances and epochs.

This is a book about the great change-makers of history and their times, people such as Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, Galileo and Mao, but it is also a book about us - for the better we understand how rulers lose touch with reality, or why revolutions produce dictators more often than they produce happiness, or why some parts of the world are richer than others, the easier it is to understand our own times.

Fresh, exciting and vividly readable, this is popular history at its very best.