What was it like to be caught in the firestorm that burried Pompeii in volcanic ash? To have dinner with Attila the Hun? To admire the tame birds in the Galapagos with Charles Darwin? To be a camp follower of General Sherman's march to the sea? To watch, with John Reed, the storming of the Winter Palace? To see the Titanic slide beneath the waves? To be on the plane that drop the atom bomb on Nagasaki?
This is history with the varnish removed. John Carey has chosen these and many more eyewitness accounts from hundreds of memoirs, letter, and travel books, as well as newspapers.