Books in brief: The New Atlas of World History | Ralph Tailor’s Summer

Michael Kerrigan casts his eye over recently published books

The New Atlas of World History

by John Haywood

(Thames & Hudson, £32) ***

Every map-spread here gives us the globe at a glance, so we see – for instance – what the Olmecs were up to during the rise of the Zhou and the Etruscan heyday. Clear and colourful timeline sections fill out the background so we get a stronger sense of the way things were developing across space and time. It’s an important perspective to have – and not just because global realities are reminding us now how narrow our overall view of history has been. Yet exciting as it is to see the wider trends, the diminishing returns are in the detail here. Do we – should we, even – care that the capture of Baghdad by the Ottomans just about dead-heated with Henry VIII’s break with Rome?

Ralph Tailor’s Summer

by Keith Wrightson

(Yale, £20) ***

1636 brought a boom in business for Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Ralph Tailor, scrivener, specialising in writing up his clients’ wills and inventories.

For that year, the city was seized by the plague: Tailor was overwhelmed with possessions to list and last wishes to record. Extraordinary access, then, and a unique perspective on a society in extremis – for the general reader, though, this is disappointingly pallid stuff.

Wrightson, an academic historian, is understandably excited by his archival discoveries and the methodological challenges they’ve brought.

For the rest of us, though, Tailor’s take feels a bit too oblique.