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Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone in charge, someone who understood how it all fitted together? Even though we know that it isn’t possible, perhaps some part of us still longs for a real-life omniscient narrator That’s part of the appeal of big, bold, transdisciplinary books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitle: ‘A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’), and, most recently, of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbusting Sapiens, published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014 Sapiens has sold over a million copies and garnered praise from big hitters as diverse as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Chris Evans and Lily Cole Five years on, it’s still a best-seller: Number 23 in Amazon’s overall books ranking, and Number 1 in several smaller categories such as ‘Civilisation and Culture’ According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales across the book market, it sold over 300,000 copies in 2018 and ranked twelfth in the year’s bestsellers Homo Deus followed, published in English in 2016; its sales figures were approaching the 1 million mark when Harari’s latest offering, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, appeared in August last year   Sapiens has a Diamond-esque, humblebrag subtitle – ‘A Brief History of Humankind’ – and sure enough, Harari thanks Diamond in his acknowledgements for teaching him ‘to see the big picture’ It’s true that his canvas is about as broad as they come, covering 6 million years of human history and finishing up with a squint at the future All that compressed into 500 pages makes for compelling reading Sapiens is full of exhilarating leaps and breezy swoops and gloriously eclectic statistics and anecdotes And even when you feel dissent rise up – at some over-confident assertion unsupported by evidence – it feels churlish and nit-picking to object Shouldn’t we be applauding the sheer scale and daring of the project?   *   In 2016, I visited Salt Lake City with my mother During our holiday, several young Mormons attempted to convert us Many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of the