A breathtakingly wide-angled history of the past five million years and a wonderful account of some of the most magnificent animals the world has ever seen. 'History at its most subversive, history that inspires and terrifies'. WASHINGTON POST

This brilliant and ambitious book is an account of the events that made our world the place it is - geologically, climatically and ecologically - and a call for a new way of thinking about history. 'We learn', Tudge writes, 'to think only in desperately trivial twinklings of time. . . But this contracted view of time is not merely comic. It is dangerous. ' The proper sense of time, he argues, is one that allows us to appreciate the world and see what we are doing to it. If humankind is to survive, we must UNLEARN most of what made us good at dominating our environment up to now.