Christopher Lloyd

An eye-opening history of the world

Christopher Lloyd has pursued a broad and comprehensive career as a journalist and author, but also as a general manager in the education business. Educated as an historian, he helped research the personal memoirs of the former Sunday Telegraph editor and journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Lloyd went on to join The Sunday Times, where he started out as a trainee and was to become an award-winning science writer.

In 1996, Lloyd launched the first internet edition of The Sunday Times and became its internet editor. Five years later, he was appointed chief executive officer of Immersive Education, an education software publishing company based in Oxford. After turning it into a highly profitable company, Lloyd decided to spend time traveling around Europe with his wife and two children. These travels inspired him to write What on Earth Happened?, a highly entertaining, comprehensive history of the world. Traversing millennia and continents, Lloyd explains exactly how the Moorish conquest gave Spain its paella, how the Earth's collision with another young planet created the moon, how dragonflies the size of seagulls emerged out of the prehistoric waters, and how the Big Bang can be detected in your television.

Needless to say, the book, launched in 2008, became a bestseller, which was quickly followed by What on Earth Evolved? 100 Species that Changed the World, which offers “an eye-opening insight into mankind's place in nature, and our pivotal relationship with the Earth itself: past, present and future.”