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A Little History of the World
by E H Gombrich
tr by Caroline Mustill
320pp, Yale University Press, pounds 14.99
| T pounds 14.99 (plus pounds 1.25p&p) 0870 428 4112 |
History, it is so often said, is just one damn thing after another; but that isn't the way children learn it at school. One term it's the Fire of London, the next, the Egyptians; Victorians rub up against Greeks, who give way to Tudors, who are succeeded by the Aztecs; and later on, of course, it's Nazis all the way. This isn't a new problem: from my own schooldays, in the 1970s and early 1980s, I can remember being taught a good deal about the life of a peasant in medieval England, and the life of a slave in ancient Rome, but being given no dates on which to hang this vague social history....