Over the past millennium of plagues and exploration, revolution and scientific discovery, human society has changed beyond recognition. Ian Mortimer's whirlwind tour of the last ten centuries of Western history is a journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders—and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer—to one in which we mapped out the entire world, and civilizations came into conflict with each other on an epic scale.