I was at our local library’s annual book sale today and noticed and bought this two volume “The Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man” by H.G. Wells. The first edition copyright was 1920, with several others through 1961. These days I like to think I saved them from the “shredder”! Wells in the preface says, “The writer is not in any professional sense an historian, but he has been making out his own private Outline from the beginnings of his career” (page 2). Then later, “But there did not seem to be any historian available who was sufficiently superficial, shall we say - sufficiently wide and sufficiently shallow to cover the vast field of the subject”. (page 3). I started reading today!
Love it!