Allan Massie
A Big Read for Little People
A Little History of the World
By E H Gombrich
Yale University Press 283pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
E H Gombrich is best known for his popular, and excellent, introduction to art history, The Story of Art, first published in 1950, translated into more than thirty languages, and still in print. No doubt some of Gombrich’s judgements have been superseded and some of his opinions seem dated. It still remains the case that anyone who has read The Story of Art can feel at ease in any of the great galleries of the Western world.
This little book is an earlier work. It was written in Vienna in the course of a few weeks in 1935, a chapter a day. The author was just twenty-five. In her introduction, his granddaughter explains how he went about it: ‘In the morning he would read up on the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind