3,000 years ago the world was being churned and pulled apart in the first great age of empire. This was a time of vicious civil wars. Andrew Marr’s History of the World II: Age of Empire
The Assyrians deported more than four million people during three centuries of dominance – slave labour. ibid.
The Phoenicians started to use little symbols for sounds. ibid.
The great discovery or invention of the Jews was monotheism. ibid.
Alexander ... was a true child of the Greek golden age. ibid.
One of the great Greek tragedies was the death of Socrates. ibid.
All around the world these are centuries when we see mass movements of moral and religious revolt. People who seem to want more. Andrew Marr’s History of the World III: The Word and the Sword
A fight between the Sword and the Word. ibid.
Chin – he named himself first emperor. ibid.
7,000 life-sized figures made of fired clay. ibid.
Egypt had once been the glory of the world ... The World’s oldest kingdom became just another Roman province. ibid.
Stephen had just become the first Christian martyr. ibid.
The number of Christians is two billion. ibid.
Christianity had spread right across the Roman world. ibid.
The Nazca were great engineers and artists. ibid.
Late summer 1498 Milan: Leonardo da Vinci had just put the finishing touches to a defining image of the High Renaissance … Europe was now home to the most dynamic culture of all. Andrew Marr’s History of the World IV: Into the Light
Few cultures just kept going all by themselves. They steal rivals’ ideas. ibid.
Crossing the oceans and seas by flat-bottomed boat, the Vikings had already terrorised and begun to colonise the British Isles, Iceland and France. They’d even reached Greenland and North America. Now they were heading deep into the heartlands of eastern Europe. ibid.
This is Islam’s golden age. ibid.
By 1223 Genghis Khan’s destruction of the Muslim empire in central Asia was complete. ibid.
Very soon the Black Death carried on ships, probably by rats, spread into the Mediterranean region and then beyond. ibid.
The capture of Constantinopal was the Ottomans’ greatest victory. ibid.
Saturday 16 November 1532 Peru: Two worlds were about to collide. Spanish adventurers had come for gold and glory. Now they had to face the most powerful man in the Americas … The unwitting rejection of Christianity became the excuse for slaughter and plunder on an epic scale. Andrew Marr’s History of the World V: Age of Plunder
In fact he’d [Columbus] landed somewhere in the Bahamas. ibid.
Pope Leo X was in a dash for cash. He was rebuilding St Peter’s Basilica, the biggest church in the world. But to some, the Pope’s sale of Indulgences to pay for this looked cynical and greedy. On October 31st 1517 a German monk is said to have strode up to Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, and nailed 95 arguments against the Church’s behaviour to the oak door. His name was Martin Luther. ibid.
The Little Ice Age: there were huge snowfalls in Spain and Portugal. ibid.
Tulips: The Dutch started buying tulip bulbs like lottery tickets. They knew all about speculation … This was the world’s first great speculative bubble. A pound of tulips were now changing hands for the price of a house, a farm, a pair of ships … The tulip market had collapsed in just four days. ibid.
In the eighteenth century most people in the world from France to India, from Russia to China, lived in the long shadow of an absolute ruler. Andrew Marr’s History of the World VI: Revolution
We call it the Enlightenment: an age of reason. ibid.
France: It’s thought that 40,000 people died in what became simply as the Terror. ibid.
In history the arrival of a small man in a big hat is rarely good news. Absolute power was back. ibid.
The African slave trade was an entrenched part of the world economic system. ibid.
The world was accelerating, and the modern age of superpowers was being born. But this is not the simple-minded story of progress, it’s also the story of all of those who said no. Andrew Marr’s History of the World VII: Age of Industry
The British had developed a new political system which limited monarchy. ibid.
[George] Stephenson’s machine [Rocket] was the biggest news of its age. ibid.
Opium – the Chinese had a taste for this highly addictive and illegal drug. ibid.
By the 1830s the most successful drug-pushers in the world weren’t Mexican bandits or Afghan warlords but the British. ibid.
China had been forced at gunpoint to open herself up to the modern global economy. ibid.
In the twentieth century – our age – our brilliance and our foolishness collided to produce one of the greatest moral dilemmas humankind has faced. For three years Robert Oppenheimer had led a top secret mission to end the deadliest war in the history of the war. Andrew Marr’s History of the World VIII: Age of Extremes
Welcome to the age of extremes. ibid.
In 1960 the Pill went on the market; it revolutionized birth control for women. ibid.
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself. Dana Arnold, Reading Architectural History, 2002
What want these outlaws conquerors should have
But History’s purchased page to call them great? Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III:48
Ideas shape the course of history. John Maynard Keynes
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning. George F Kennan
The dignity of history. Henry Fielding
And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as ‘History’, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
If history is going to repeat itself I should think we can expect the same thing again. Terry Venables
Patriotism ruins history. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘You knew that here was a star, an unusual type of star.’ Reputations s2e4: A J P Taylor: An Unusual Kind of Star, BBC 1995
A J P Taylor was the most famous historian of his generation. Brilliant and prolific he was unique in being just as happy writing for the popular press as for the Oxford University press … Television made him a star. ibid.
The BBC grew nervous of this loose cannon. ibid.
ITV: Taylor’s lectures never changed: he addressed the camera directly without rehearsal, notes, photographs or any editing whatsoever. And still people watched. ibid.
A man of the left with a lifetime’s commitment to giving history back to the ordinary people. ibid.
‘I’m a straight narrative historian.’ ibid. Taylor
Did Hitler Cause the War? ibid. BBC 1961 debate with Hugh Trevor-Roper, re Taylor’s book The Origins of the Second World War
Who teaches the teachers of history and where do they get their knowledge? Who publishes those books that become the standard history books and under what circumstances? What kinds of records are allowing into this historical narrative and what is excluded? The Corbett Report: History is Written by the Winners, James Corbett online 2018
Bede was a Sunderland man. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 1/8: Britannia, BBC 2012
Bede wrote the first great book on British history and identity: Historia Ecclesiastica. ibid.
That history – it gets ingrained into you. Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, Channel 4 2022