In my ideal utopian world everyone is interested in history and this book is on everybody's favorite list. In our less ideal world, this book can still be read by anyone and, for the intellectual snob trapped in all of us, there is at least one brilliant and easily quotable insight per page. I'm not sure the author had Twitter in mind when he wrote this book (it's actually a series of lectures from the 1960s) but his concise witticisms look deliberately crafted for our Soundbite Age. Just for the record, this is a compliment. A humongous one.