It's a big tome, which covers a lot of events in history with half to one page. That format brings with it a lot of constraints. Given those constraints, I thought it did remarkably well. There are parts of history that I felt I knew quite well and I thought the coverage of those was good. The beauty of the book is that having read it there were many other parts of history that I had no, or just the most fleeting, knowledge of - and now I have at least an awareness of them. The authors are British, and whilst the coverage does strive to be international, and the coverage of European history seems to be quite broad, there were a few selections that left me wondering "did that really shape the world?". Definitely not a cover-to-cover read, but a nice book to dip into. ( )