Many will have in their libraries some of the vast, multi-decker histories from the 19th century: John Lothrop Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855); Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England (1848); James Anthony Froude’s lives of the Tudors; Thomas Carlyle’s Frederick the Great (1858-65); and perhaps the mother of them all, George Grote’s vast History of Greece (1846-56). These days, as most contemporary historians know, even mooting a multi-volume work is enough to have publishers reaching for a sedative: attention spans are shorter, and alternative sources of entertainment more numerous, than they used to be. Such obstacles are nothing to Conrad Black, however. The former newspaper publisher and amateur (in the best sense) historian, whose previous books include Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (2003), Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), and a history of his native Canada, Rise to Greatness (2014), makes the scale of his literary ambition clear from the very title of his latest work: The Political and Strategic History of the World. And this is merely Volume I: From Antiquity (not Thucydides, whom many of us considered the first historian, but the Old Testament) to the Caesars, taking the story up to A.D. 14.

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