An encyclopedic, unwieldy and yet mesmerizing survey of humanity as told through millennia of rulers and their blood-drenched empires. It's a towering work of imagination, somehow successful as it teeters beneath the awesome weight of names, dates and interpretations.

Heavier on masters than on plot.

Tells the story of humanity through families, be they large or small, powerful or weak, rich or poor. It is a book for people who want to read about people. There’s little attention paid to impersonal forces.

A rollicking tale, a kaleidoscope of savagery, sex, cruelty and chaos.

Weighing in at 1,300 pages, this rollicking, globetrotting 'biography of many people rather than one person' spans the Akkadian empire and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is almost unpickupable: whether you find it unputdownable may depend on your appetite for narrative and yearning for a thesis, as well as an iron stomach and sheer Sitzfleisch to match the author’s own.

It is a huge subject; but then this is a doorstopper of a book, running to a numbing 1,262-plus pages.

Necessarily selective.

[A] sweeping chronicle.

A panoramic, abundantly populated, richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time.