The historians. Vol. Book 39. The rise & fall of gestures drama

This Book 39 The Rise and Fall of Gestures Drama is the first in the 100 book series of The historians, an encyclopaedic compendium of everything in the world gathered together in one place.

Conceived and written by Peter Greenaway, this whole work, to be published in its entirety of 100 books over the next ten years, creates and examines in exhausting detail the 100 year history of a great continent.

The arbiters of this grand history conceived lest we should forget, and written to encourage the desire and necessity for vigorous continuity, are a large and motley collection of historians, all with vested special interests, all determined to stave off forgetfulness and mortality. Among the titles of the other 99 books in the series are histories of toys, games, cripples, towers, conceptions, diseases, maps, tics, red hats, adulteries, journeys to the sea, languages, names, gardens, acts of violence, pricks, griefs and ghosts.

It may be that items and events that have already occurred in the history of the world in the last five thousand years might be perceived and recognised, though seemingly distorted, retold, re-imagined, viewed through a mirror or a mist, indeed entirely reset with different outcomes ; and it might be that among the historians themselves, we might recognise a fictionalised Carlo Ginzburg, a Macaulay, a Carlyle, and a Gibbon or a Raleigh, if not perhaps a Tacitus or a Livy.

If it was necessary to summon up a very quick resumé of this ambitious project, it might be profitable simply to say here indeed is copious evidence, if we should need it, to repeat that « there is no such thing as history, there are only historians ».