A Short History of the World in 50 Lies

by Natasha Tidd

Synopsis:

Taking readers on a global journey through human history, Natasha Tidd examines how lies can change the world around us, from Julius Caesar’s deceptive PR machine to the cover-ups that caused Chernobyl.

From forgeries that created centuries worth of conflict and domination, such as The Donation of Constantine, the Protocols of Zion and the mysterious Testament of Peter the Great, to mass political and press cover-ups including Britain’s Boer War concentration camps, a Pulitzer Prize-winning whitewash of the Ukraine Famine and the infamous Dreyfus Affair in France.

Alongside these are examinations of how our retellings of history can turn fiction into fact, including The Spanish Inquisition’s deceitful legacy. Plus, there is an in-depth look at how historic lies can still impact our lives today, such as the deadly legacy of America’s Tuskegee Experiment.

Meet incredible people, including Jeanne de Clisson who became the fourteenth century's most feared pirate – all because of a lie.

A Short History of the World in 50 Lies details the profound impact of this secretive side of history and shows that the truth really is stranger – and far more dangerous – than any fiction.

Natasha Tidd’s A Short History of the World in 50 Lies is an incredibly light popular-history book that dedicates 3-4 pages at most to each ‘lie’. It’s short, easy to read, and overall as breezy as you’d expect. I didn’t catch her out in any major errors, though I’d be curious how much research she did on any of these, because it seemed like a very surface-level effort: despite her afterword about how biased history is and how she hopes this inspires people to learn the truth, much of it was exactly what I’d learned elsewhere.

At least one aspect of it was also very much the online pop-history party line: she discusses the Chevalier d’Éon as a trans icon who lived as a woman for much of their life… but in Queer Georgians, Anthony Delaney dissects this myth in a lot of detail and finds that d’Éon was forced into presenting as a woman by the French court, but pleaded repeatedly to be treated as male (and an autopsy found that d’Éon had male genitalia). This leans toward suggesting that at the very least it was complex, and Tidd’s version very much removes that complexity in favour of the quick Tumblr-post knowledge about d’Éon.

Obviously this isn’t a book thick with original research or anything like that, and maybe Tidd has researched d’Éon and disagrees with Delaney — but Delaney’s research and sources were clear to me and Tidd’s are not, so it’s impossible to say.

I looked her up to find out her credentials, and it seems like she has an MA in “historical research” from somewhere (not named), but… there was one other marker which made me take it with heaping tablespoons of salt, and that was referring to Geoffrey of Monmouth as “Monmouth”. It’s like thinking Jennifer Lopez’s surname is “from the Block”. Geoffrey was from Monmouth, but that isn’t a surname, and no one serious refers to him as “Monmouth”. Like, I was told in my first year of undergrad that if we made such a silly error, we’d have the examiners looking at us very closely, wondering what else we were gonna mess up. It’s amateur, and I’d generally expect better. Maybe it’s not really her period — but then look at what the scholarly standard is and copy that.

Overall, just very light and not to be taken seriously, much as I usually enjoy this format.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)