Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Cawthorne.

In today's episode, you'll be hearing from the archaeologist and television presenter Neil Oliver.

On his new book, The Story of the World in a hundred moments.

It's a whistle-stop tour through some of history's key events,

from the world's first poet to the death of one of Britain's last First World War veterans.

BBC History revealed staff writer Emma Slatterley Williams spoke to Neil to find out more.

Your new book, The Story of the World in 100 moments, as the name suggests,

takes us through human history through key events. What made you take on this mammoth task of

exploring the history in just 100 moments? That is the question. It was, it was, I knew it was going to be

big, a big job, but once I started on it, I really,

I almost panicked and threw up my hands and abandoned the whole thing because it just became,

well, for me, it was, it was quite monumental, really, in its scale. It came from, the idea was,

I had always, or for the longest time, I had thought it would be great

fun to be able to stand up on a stage, as it were, and tell the story of the world in

an hour, I thought. I thought it would be great to be able to summarize human history down

to something manageable that for an hour or so that the people listening

might however briefly feel that they could hold the whole story in their heads,

even if it would eventually get away from them again.

And it had been a dream or a pipe dream for the longest period of time.

But then finally, I had written previously the story of the British Isles in a hundred places,

and I thought this would be the ideal time to try and bring my big dream to life and to make it real.

Because apart from anything else, it felt a little bit like a grander sequel to the

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