His account of the pandemic is a summary of the story up to last autumn six months on, his perspective at times feels mistaken. Perhaps Mr Ferguson wanted to get in before the competition, but he would have done better to wait. About a quarter of the book is about covid-19, which is presumably the reason why it was written. Whistle-stop tours of world history succeed if the itinerary plots an arresting case “Doom” supplies the tour, but the reader is left wondering what the point of it is. Here you may find yourself turning to the long chapter descriptions at the start to see why you are reading about the Battle of the Somme or the decline of the Ming dynasty. But a book that ranges so widely needs a strong thread to hold it together.

Mr Ferguson offers a wealth of deep research, some of it gripping-such as Thucydides’s account of the unravelling of ancient Athenian society after a plague, the reasons for the lifeboat shortage on the Titanic and the views of Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist, on the organisational causes of the Challenger disaster. When bad things happen to humanity, humanity is largely to blame. If the set takes in the Titanic, the Challenger space shuttle, the war in Syria and a possible conflict with China, and if “politics” includes the way people and organisations work together-which is how Mr Ferguson defines both concepts-his main contention becomes a statement of the obvious. Amartya Sen, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, made it in 1981 in “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation” his perception that famine is caused not by crop failure but by politics made his name.

If it is drawn narrowly enough to include only those that seem natural, such as pandemics, Mr Ferguson’s observation is interesting but not original.

But the set of disasters under consideration is key.

Doom niall ferguson review