Our understanding of world history is changing as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey Andrew Marr revisits some of the traditional epic stories from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon but surrounds them with less familiar material from Peru to the Ukraine China to the Caribbean. He looks at cultures that have failed and vanished as well as the origins of todays superpowers and finds surprising echoes and parallels across vast distances and epochs.This is a book about the great change-makers of history and their times people such as Cleopatra Genghis Khan Galileo and Mao but it is also a book about us. For the better we understand how rulers lose touch with reality or why revolutions produce dictators more often than they produce happiness or why some parts of the world are richer than others the easier it is to understand our own times.