I've just finished a slightly different history book - *Making History, The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past * by Richard Cohen. Its tells the story of historians from Herodotus and Thucydides through to modern television documentary makers. It's a big book (660 pages before the footnotes), and a big sweep of time.

I think it generally works well. It covers the obvious historians (Gibbon, Suetonius), the obvious in hindsight (Shakespeare, Trotsky, Churchill) plus a range of voices that have been underrepresented. There are some great chapters on fiction as history, Marxist historians, Machiavelli and black historians.

Its a narrative read rather than a book on histiography, but it's all the more readable for it. I'd recommend it.