Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his History of the World in prison awaiting execution. H G Wells and more recently E H Gombrich managed to fit their world histories into little more than 150 pages. But they used very broad brushes and, interesting though their works may be, they adopted the absurd expedient of barely mentioning anywhere outside Europe, a small sliver of the Middle East and North America, where less than 20 per cent of the world’s population have ever existed.

Simon Sebag Montefiore in his monumental The World: A Family History attempts something more ambitious, and he succeeds in scintillating fashion. At more than 1,300 pages, it is undeniably long, but it is an epic rich in detail – the story of our species from primeval slime to Donald Trump. Stick with it and on each page you’ll find an interesting idea, a witty observation or a footnote containing an anecdote emblematic of a wider point.

Montefiore’s novel approach is based on the argument that the family is the essential unit of human existence – even in the age of the iPhone, artificial intelligence, robotics and space travel. He uses the stories of multiple families over dozens of generations, living on every continent and in every era, to tell the human story.

It’s a refreshing structure that makes it very different from any other of the broad histories I was brought up on or have read in adulthood. Montefiore pays attention to the lives of women and children, and to places that have until very recently been slighted by Western