The World: A Family History

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Simon Sebag Montefiore – The Author". Orion Books. 2008. Archived from the original on 30 July 2014 . Retrieved 4 May 2009. Moloney, Charlie; Burgess, Kaya (7 July 2023). "Archbishop of Canterbury: Cut university funding if students insulted". The Times . Retrieved 1 September 2023. MONTEFIORE: Simon Sebag Montefiore - his new book, "The World: A Family History Of Humanity," accompanied by a playlist on Spotify. Thanks so much for being with us. This is more than schoolboy fun in a way – it puts our contemporary obsessions, both with talking about sex, and also with condemning such things: in a new light. We've always been at it. Simon Sebag-Montefiore (22 October 1983). "An Interview with the Prime Minister". The Harrovian– via Aspects of History.

Another aspect of this is his custom of blithely suggesting he is the only historian to have recognised or understood some particular matter. “Western history writing often…” or “This is much neglected by historians” he laments, without naming the errant scholars. This crappy app ate my previous review as I was most of the way through it. Ugh. This was a very long book and I don’t want to spend much more time on it, so I’ll try to keep it brief this time as this review is just for my own notes anyway. Gripping and cleverly plotted. Doomed love at the heart of a violent society is the heart of Montefiore's One Night in Winter... depicting the Kafkaesque labyrinth into which the victims stumble." The Sunday TimesThis book is like a puzzle. Each family history is a single puzzle piece, with a part of the whole picture on it. You can look briefly at each piece and see what's on it, but its not until you put it all together that you get to see the whole picture. He is also closely involved in interfaith relations. In July 2023 he interviewed on stage the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, at an interfaith event hosted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews at England's oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks Synagogue. [24] [25] Films and TV drama series [ edit ]

Made young with young desires» 18 May 1991» The Spectator Archive". The Spectator Archive . Retrieved 8 July 2023. As an Irish person I was interested to hear what he had to say about my own little island. I thought his representation of the Cromwellian period was even-handed enough but then we seemed to totally disappear from the narrative even as it became increasingly more Anglocentric.

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Important and mesmerizing.” —Michael Beschloss, New York Times best-selling author of Presidents of War When I see film of someone climbing the outside of a skyscraper (this is “buildering”, apparently), I am amazed at the audacity of their enterprise, and I am confronted with the reality that, whatever my skills are, they would not include this activity. Yet I wonder at their purpose and find no convincing answer to the question of what has been gained by the successful completion of the exercise. At heart, though, my objection to The World: A Family History is more substantial than these points. I would describe SSM’s approach to the work as being, essentially, salacious tabloid. It is a conglomeration of gory violence; sexual activity, particularly favouring slightly eccentric varieties, and rape; excessive alcohol and drug-usage; and general scatology. (It is something of a paradox, then, that he describes Martin Luther as “fixated on faeces and sex”, the “faecal fulminator”.) I should mention that Montefiore also enjoys describing the appearance of misshapen or disfigured individuals. And there are many times when trivial information is included amongst the omission of significant historical events. Thus a whole paragraph is dedicated to details of “Haroun’s wedding to his double first cousin Zubaida (which) was said to have been the greatest party of all time” in 1782. MONTEFIORE: We often revere history as propulsive, as almost sacred in its authority. And, in fact, history doesn't matter that much. What really matters is how people want to live now. And that's the difference between Ukraine, for example, and President Putin. President Putin is living in the age of Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin and Nicholas I. And the Ukrainians want to live now in freedom. And that's the theme of that beautiful song by Sam Cooke.