Woman here, writing about humans.

I’ve been reading an enormous history book by a guy called Simon Sebag Montefiore. The book is modestly titled “The World”; it’s The Times History Book of the Year and it’s got lovely reviews from people who do Big History, like Peter Frankopan.

Montefiore gallops through the centuries at breakneck pace — you do get lost sometimes but it’s written with such verve and attack that you don’t mind.

I suppose I’m about a quarter of the way through it — and it starts 4000 years ago with Enheduanna, a princess of the Akkadian empire: she was “at the height of her splendour when a raider invading the empire attacked her city, seized her and evidently raped her.”

It’s an amazing book, full of awful dangerous sexually-voracious people (male and female) who have somehow got to the height of power in their time. Some of the stories about them are very very funny. Sometimes it’s all rather sad because Montefiore is particularly interested in the families as well as the individuals. And much more often than not, the families at the top of the tree are horrible: brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters — everybody is shagging everybody, even if they’re eunuchs. Oh and murdering each other.

In fact there’s more family murder than shagging which is saying something.