The World

Hashemites and Kennedys, Maos, Nehruvians and Assads

Lyonia the Ballerina: Brezhnev In Power

The Scorpion’S Bite and the Fall of Little Cannon: Mao Unleashes Jiang Qing

Nasser and the King: Six Days In June

The Assassinations: Rfk, Mlk, Mboya

The Aphrodisiac of Power: Kissinger and Nixon’S Triangular Game

Killing B -52: Mao and Pol Pot

Call Me Sir – Dumb Doll Dominates India

I Like Rightists: American Metternich and the Philosopher -King of China

Houses of Solomon and Bush, Bourbon, Pahlavi and Castro

Wild Beasts and Lions: The Assads of Damascus

Imperial Peacocks: The Satanic Feast and the Angel

Did King David Retire? The

Negus

and Major Mengistu

Brother No. 1 and the Gang of Four

The Crusader and the Prince: European Tyrants and Democrats

Indira and Son

Little Cannon, The Eight Immortals and the Scorpion’S Gang

Castro’S Africa

The Spymaster: andropov and His ProtéGé Gorbachev

Imam, Shah and Saddam

Jj of Ghana and Sadat In Jerusalem

Operation 333 In Kabul

Poppy, Osama and W

Maggie and Indira

The Nehruvians: Third Generation

ACT TWENTY-TWO 4.4 BILLION

Yeltsins and Xis, Nehruvians and Assads, Bin Ladens, Kims and Obamas

The Idiot and the Cannon: Gorbachev, Deng and the Unipower

New Africa: Mandela and Jj, Menes and Isaias

The

Familia

: Boris, Tatiana and Rasputin

Knights of Damascus, Marxist Monster Movies and Kings of Data: Iphones and Daggers

Prince of the Towers

Bashar, The Bayonet and the Mona Lisa of India

Where Lions and Cheetahs Lurk

The Killing of Geronimo

ACT TWENTY-THREE 8 BILLION

Trumps and Xis, Sauds, Assads and Kims

The Caliphate and the Crimea

The Dynasts

The Emperor, The Tsar and the Comedian

Conclusion

Epigraph

Select Bibliography

Also by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Copyright

If a kingdom be a great family, a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.

Samuel Johnson

The world is a mountain and our deeds, voices;

The voices have echoes; to us they will return.

Rumi

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Chinua Achebe

Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such an affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.

Theodore Parker

So many wars, so many shapes of crime . . .

Unholy Mars bends all to his mad will;

The world is like a chariot run wild.

Virgil

The whole question is: who controls whom.

Lenin

He who believes that by studying isolated histories, he can acquire a fairly just view of history as a whole, is like the person who, after looking at the severed limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has seen the creature alive in all its action and grace . . . It is only indeed by study of the interconnection of all the particulars, their resemblances and differences, that we are enabled at least to make a general survey, and thus derive both benefit and pleasure from history.

Polybius

Midway on life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost.

Dante Alighieri

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a world history that I wrote during the menacing times of Covid lockdown and Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are a million ways to do such a thing; hundreds of historians, starting in ancient times, have done it their way; most universities now have professors of world history and scores of such works are published annually, many of them brilliant, and I have tried to read them all. No book is easy to write, world history harder than most. ‘Words and ideas pour out of my head,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun composing his world history, ‘like cream into a churn.’ There has been much cream and much churning in the writing of this.

I have always wanted to write an intimate, human history like this, in some ways a new approach, in some ways a traditional one, which is the fruit of a lifetime of study and travels. I have been lucky enough to visit many of the places in this history, to witness wars and coups that play a part in it, and to have conversations with a few characters who have played roles on the world stage.

When I was eleven, my father, a thoughtful medical doctor, gave me an abridged version of the now pungently unfashionable Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. ‘Maybe one day,’ he said, ‘you’ll write something like this,’ and I spent hours reading histories of places and times that were not taught at my English school, where study of the Tudors and Nazis dominated.