Conrad Black's history of the world is magnificent
National Post, 17 May 2026
Reading the latest volume is pure joy
The May long weekend — the sovereign’s official birthday — brings forth recommended lists for summer reading. An excellent time, I would suggest, for Post readers to discover Conrad Black the Historian — he has long earned the capital “H.”
My Saturday page-mate has done many things on both sides of the newspaper business, as proprietor and commentator. And he has been an esteemed historian for a half-century; we are soon to mark the 50th anniversary of his authoritative biography of Maurice Duplessis, the titanic premier of Quebec.
Duplessis was a substantial work at more than 600 pages, but Black was only getting warmed up. His celebrated biographies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, as well as his much-needed history of Canada, Rise to Greatness, all weighed in at more than a thousand pages. That can be intimidating for the reader, but Black has the happy talent of making a thousand pages read with the liveliness of his thousand-word columns.
Even Conrad’s friends and admirers, of which I am one, were taken aback when he decided to write The Political and Strategic History of the World. At the outset of the project his 80th birthday was already beckoning. Yet this spring the third volume has arrived: From Louis XIV to the Brink of World War I, A.D. 1661-1914. Like the first two volumes, it is over a thousand pages. Conrad had planned three volumes, but there will now be a fourth volume forthcoming, covering the Great War to the present day.
It is a colossal achievement, and a work of generational significance in the writing of history in the English language. It is hard to compare Conrad’s history of the world to others; his intellectual ambition and astonishing stamina are singular. No one else even tries. Mammoth multi-volume histories were thought to have been left behind with Churchill.
It is not necessary to begin at volume I, From Antiquity to the Caesars, and march through the subsequent three-thousand-plus pages. I prefer to drop into one period or another, either to learn more about something already of interest to me, or to open the books at random — like an encyclopaedia — and learn something about which I previously knew nothing.
For example, in volume III I happened on this passage about Iran (Persia) in 17th-century India, a timely reminder that Iran’s current regime is not worthy of its own people and their civilization.
Did you know “Persian became the language of the court of Agra,” and that “Persian poets, artists, musicians, and architects flocked to the capital, which the royal family preferred to Delhi”?
This model of “Persian-Indian elegance and grandeur” produced in due course the Taj Mahal, an example of “the Safavid Persian style, (which,) including jewelry, silk, perfumes and peacock feathers, and the pleasures of the luxurious harem, found many converts among the Muslims as well as the Hindus, and contributed importantly to the Indianization of Muslim culture and the stability of Mughal rule over two centuries.”
I did not know that, and now I do. There are dozens upon dozens of such examples in Black’s pages.
It is not intuitive that this brickload of history is a time-saver, but time spent immersed in it yields more information, analysis and even wisdom than the ready alternatives in our digital environment.
Consider this assessment of the Second Inaugural from the section on Abraham Lincoln, entitled “The Ordeal and Redemption of America”: “He effectively reconciled more directly and eloquently than any other American statesmen Christian America’s embrace of the Enlightenment.”
That single sentence could be the assigned topic for a graduate seminar in political philosophy.
Nearly 20 years ago Conrad and I discussed who was the greatest prose stylist in the English language, ceding to Shakespeare the poet’s laurel. We both settled on 19th-century figures; St. John Henry Newman for me, President Lincoln for Conrad.
Continue reading at the National Post.