History: No one tells a story better than a grandfather.
Mine was a sailor, so for me it was stories of the Suez Canal, pyramids and sphinxes, perilous journeys round the Cape, and how time could go backwards as you crossed the seas. A Little History of the World, published posthumously after the author's death at the age of 92, comes with a loving introduction by his granddaughter. Hearing his stories, she says, was like listening to a Viennese waltz.
Except that when EH Gombrich, probably the most famous art historian of our time, wrote this stirring dash through the history of the world, he was only 25 years old. Gombrich is the author of The Story of Art, which has sold more than six million copies. The grandly patrician tone of that work, albeit with scholarship worn lightly, leaves the sense of a formidable European intellectual. But A Little History of the World was written by a completely different Gombrich: a young, unemployed and impoverished Viennese graduate, turning his literary skills for a quick buck. He wrote this children's book, covering 5,000 years up to the first World War, in just six frantic weeks in 1935. Thrilling, opinionated, with crashing judgments and the boring bits left out, A Little History of the World turns out not to be a story told by your grandfather, but by your impossibly cool big brother.
The young Gombrich believed passionately in progress. His is a reassuringly Whig view of history in which things always get better as humankind moves from one generation to another. You can sense his relief when we finally arrive at the Enlightenment. "What you must never forget is the importance for our own lives of tolerance, reason and humanity," he tells us. Even at 25, we sense, Gombrich understood that above all else he was a child of the Enlightenment.
But in case you think that your children are going to be lectured on ideas, Gombrich understands that our natural inclination in enjoying the past comes in hearing stories of how great men and women changed the world. His hero is Napoleon, who was not only a brilliant soldier, but also a wonderful scholar. When he went to Egypt, Gombrich writes admiringly, "he took scholars with him too, to observe and study the remnants of antiquity". And he enforced logic where previously there had been chaos. As emperor, "he worked night and day at establishing order in France". Gombrich is cheering with the crowds when he says that "all of France worshipped Napoleon". But there is a sad coda to this enthusiasm for progress, order and the deeds of great men. The original version of A Little History of the World concluded with a hope for a better future. This new edition (translated into English for the first time) comes with an afterword that Gombrich wrote more than 10 years later. Youthful idealism has evaporated. In 1936, this Jewish writer had fled to London to escape the Nazis, shattering in the process his belief in human progress. He revisits his chapter on the Enlightenment. "At the time that I wrote that it seemed inconceivable that anyone might ever again stoop to persecuting people of a different religion, use torture to extract confessions, or question the rights of man," he writes sadly. "But what seemed unthinkable to me happened all the same." It is a poignant end to a joyful book, yet one that is somehow typical of a work that, despite its enthusiasm for humankind and history, refuses to patronise children by holding back on the bad news.
Richard Aldous teaches modern history at UCD. His biography of Malcolm Sargent is published by Pimlico
A Little History of the World By EH Gombrich Yale University Press, 284 pp. £14.99