从我们最伟大的历史学家之一，JM·罗伯茨，来了一个引人入胜的卷历史非凡的世纪，我们刚刚经历。罗伯茨标识超出了传统的按时间顺序叙述事件，背后主要的长期变化，特别指向全球预期寿命增加，主要在科学和技术的进步，彻底重构全球经济帝国的消失白色霸权的衰落和女性角色的转变。

J.M. Roberts's monumental Penguin History of the World became a publishing phenomenon and sold in the hundreds of thousands. Now he has produced an equally brilliant new book, focusing solely on our own troubled and dramatic century, and it has all the breathtaking sweep and confident judgment of his previous work. Most important, Roberts takes a truly international view of things. The 20th century, he argues, is marked as much as anything by the decline of Europe as the world's sole arbiter and the emergence of today's cosmopolitan, global civilization, born of decolonization, the resurgence of Islam, and the vibrant, self-assured new nations of Asia and Latin America. He also examines the other two major trends of our time: the social and economic empowerment of women and the extraordinary quadrupling of the world's population, most of it in Third World countries. A challenging and exacting read, Twentieth Century is destined to be a classic. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk