by Jack Doyle Of the historians who flaunt their wares on television, there is little doubt who is the natural poster boy. David Starkey may be more cutting, but for aesthetic appeal look no further than Oxford don Niall Ferguson.

A writer who is difficult to escape both in print and on the small screen to the extent that his new book puffs his Channel 4 series on the front cover must face the accusation that his written work is of secondary importance.

With a title like The War Of The World: History's Age Of Hatred, Ferguson cannot escape the charge of bombast. No opportunity to make a headline is missed, nor is there any shortage of shock tactics, but Ferguson is too thoughtful a historian and too assiduous a researcher to allow such a charge to stand.

He delivers occasionally radical, at least contrary and certainly provocative, historical narrative. The War Of The World is no exception. Ethnic conflict, rapid economic change and the end of empire are the driving force behind 20th-century conflict, he argues. The carnage and disaster that century wrought will leave the East, not the West, a reigning legacy.

Lucid, punchy and absorbing, Ferguson's work is at times not as controversial as it might seem at first sight, and his argument allows the most words for its strongest points.

Ferguson is criticised as right-wing and populist. A Thatcherite he may have been, but his writing is not knee-jerk political.

And if we're interested in history, why not have catalogue-model looks delivering it in an energetic, challenging way?