The Political and Strategic History of the World, Vol I - by Conrad Black

About the Book

This is a landmark history which will stand together with Gibbon, Mommsen, Prescott, and Churchill among the greatest histories of the world ever written.

Book Synopsis

The Political and Strategic History of the World, Vol I: From Antiquity to the Caesars, 14 A.D. covers great swathes of time beginning with the earliest written records of the Hebrews, Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and the ancient East, through the rise of the Greeks and Persians, the conquests of Alexander the Great, and then the rise of Rome, culminating in the Augustan Empire. The great men and women of the ancient world are portrayed with admiration (or opprobrium) and always with a dash of humor and the perspective that only someone as widely read and deeply learned as Lord Black can deliver. This is a landmark history which will stand together with Gibbon, Mommsen, Prescott, and Churchill among the greatest histories of the world ever written.

Review Quotes

Advance Praise for The Strategic and Political History of the World, Vol I:

Our modern Gibbon, Conrad Black takes the reader from the dawn of History to the death of Augustus with erudition, humour, insight and immense readability. In the course of the gripping story, he stumbles upon the hugely uplifting (and surprisingly Whiggish) fact that Mankind's ability to govern itself is improving, albeit in fits and starts.

-Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

Lord Black's ambitious work begins with prehistory and gains momentum with the death of Caesar. It is presented with elegance and erudition.

-Dr. Henry Kissinger

World histories usually require large collaborative teams of scholarly specialists. Contemporary academic history just assumes that are no longer any Gibbons, Mommsens, or Prescotts to be found. Conrad Black, however, is one of a handful of contemporary historians who could undertake a narrative, multivolume history of world civilization, and restore the value of that grand tradition. Yet the singular task requires prodigious research, facility in a number of languages, a lifetime of wide reading and publication, a fertile imagination, common and good sense, scholarly rigor, a masterful prose style, and unrivaled discipline. In all these areas Black excels. And the result is a landmark work of universal history that will enthrall the public and earn the respect and admiration of scholars-for many decades to come.

-Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, author of Carnage and Culture and The Second World Wars