THE PRECIPICE

A Guardian Financial Times New Statesman The Rest is Politics and Waterstones Highlight for 2024 Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel What we have here is a truly encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world THE TIMES A work of great confidence empathy learning and imagination RORY STEWART Bold beautifully written and filled with insights Extraordinary PETER FRANKOPAN One of the most fascinating and important works of global history to appear for many years WILLIAM DALRYMPLEThe West the story goes was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance But what if that isn t true In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe So much of our shared history has been lost drowned out by the concept developed in the Victorian era of separate civilisations Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West as societies met tangled and somet