J.M. Roberts. A Short History of the World. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Some years ago I wrote a History of the World. When my publisher sug-gested to me that I should go on to write a A Short History of the World, I knew it would be much more challenging than writing the bigger book had been. This is not a condensation. You cannot just boil down general his-tory, reducing pages to paragraphs, and paragraphs to sentences. Topics must be distributed differently, sometimes in different sequences if the main lines are to be brought out in a shorter space. Some things have to go altogether in any attempt to tell a story in briefer terms, and so some others will loom larger than before. That is as it should be; history is about what is important in answering the questions the historian wants to answer and however small his topic seems to be, and however long his book, he never can actually do more than say what is important and rele-vant from his point of view and in answering his questions.