Plagues Upon the Earth Disease and the Course of Human History (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

And then I also wanted to recommend Kyle Harper's Plagues Upon the Earth, which is a history of disease and the way that it has shaped history and politics, social life, civilization for the whole of human history.

That is from Plagues Upon The Earth, Disease and the Course of Human History, a brilliant new book by Carl Harper who is Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma and wrote a fantastic book The Fate of Rome which he looks at how disease impacted on the fall of the Roman Empire.

It's on a vast scale. We go from Homo erectus so the earliest ancestors of Homo sapiens right the way up to COVID. And that passage that I read, it's a kind of reminder to us how unusual that actually we're not all dying of infectious diseases.

I started it in 2017 when it was going to be a kind of project that I spent several years thinking about and then writing. It wasn't born as a COVID book but it came to completion certainly under the shadow of COVID which was pretty bizarre, pretty surreal to end up with a book that was far more urgent and resonant than I ever imagined when I started writing it.