Unlike many reviewers I was very disappointed in this book. I was hoping that it would fill a gap in the field of historiography, but found it very unbalanced. The author is actually a specialist in modern intellectual history, so he has departed from Gibbon in his study of classical antiquity and does not bring the knowledge of a specialist to this important field. Most remarkable is his almost complete neglect of the major achievements in the development of the modern discipline during the Renaissance. This is an entertaining book for the historical amateur, but I would not recommend it for a serious student of the subject.
