Making History Great Again

Christian Caryl

History, Americas

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World, offers a jaunty tour of past historical greats.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), 640 pp., $20.00.

SIMON SEBAG Montefiore is one of those rare writers who knows how to put the story back into history. In his earlier books, he combined solid research with a knack for turning long-dead figures into vivid characters. In Catherine the Great and Potemkin, a doorstop of a book, he explored the tempestuous romantic and professional relationship between the Russian empress and her swashbuckling lover, bringing to life a period that has rarely received its due. In The Court of the Red Tsar, he illuminated Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule by tracing the intricate and incestuous bonds among the Bolshevik elite. In Jerusalem: The Biography, he managed to transform an entire city into an eccentric persona.

His new book, Titans of History, may be his guiltiest pleasure yet. It brings together dozens of mini-biographies of the most interesting people of the past three thousand years—starting with Rameses the Great (1302–1213 BC) and winding up with Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of isis. (I’m taking a minor liberty here. Actually, the book ends with the semi-mythical figure of Tank Man, the anonymous citizen who courageously defied the Chinese military during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989—but since we don’t really know anything for sure about his identity, Montefiore uses him as a kind of cipher of the human desire for freedom from tyranny. Plus, he’s out of sequence.)

THIS WORK departs significantly from Montefiore’s previous efforts in some respects. For one thing, it’s a collective effort: Montefiore credits four co-authors with the research for his globe-spanning project. The style of these bite-sized biographies, however, is unmistakably Montefiore’s—he was clearly responsible for buffing each part to his customary high shine. Throughout, Montefiore exhibits a keen eye for the telling detail and juicy anecdote.