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The writing of history is one of the great legacies of the ancient Greeks, and its earliest masters, Herodotus and Thucydides, are as central to the foundations of Western civilization as Homer, Socrates and Sophocles. In more modern times, multivolume sagas of crumbling empires, explosive revolutions and nations nudging toward greatness were huge best sellers, making historians like Edward Gibbon, Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle as well known as Stephen King and John Grisham are today.

But the fact that this needs stating, or that we must intermittently re-emphasize history's relevance to understanding ourselves, points to a problem that has hounded the discipline in recent years — its tendency toward clubby academic isolation. A fine antidote to this trend is John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, an ambitious and accessible account of the historian's craft over the last 2,500 years. In the tradition of Ford Madox Ford's The March of Literature and Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, Burrow's book is at once idiosyncratic and encyclopedic. A former professor of European thought at Oxford University, Burrow marshals a lifetime of knowledge and guides the reader effortlessly across the ages.

Along with Herodotus — hailed here as "a marker set down against the oblivion with which time threatens all human deeds" — and Thucydides, the earliest exponent of realpolitik, Burrow devotes the first third of his book to a long line of Greco-Roman historians. He goes on to discuss "the radical and pervasive" impact of the Bible on history — for example, in the writings of the 6th century French Bishop Gregory of Tours, whom he dubs "Trollope with blood." Equally intriguing is Burrow's discussion of the secular historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, a fabricator who claimed that his 12th century account of King Arthur was in fact a translation of an early work in Welsh — one that nobody else has ever been able to unearth. Geoffrey's "pseudo history," writes Burrow, dressed up myth as fact, thereby launching Arthur and his knights as potent symbols of Britain's "emerging ethos of chivalry."

Inevitably, the immensity of Burrow's task requires as much omission as inclusion, and from the get-go he states his intention to bypass memoirs. Fortunately, at first, he seems to forget his own criterion. For instance, several pages are devoted to Xenophon's The Persian Expedition, a masterful account of a small Greek army trapped behind enemy lines, deep in the heart of the Persian Empire. Yet one of the stars of the show was Xenophon himself, his book a subtle piece of self-promotion. Likewise, Burrow makes a welcome exception for a memoir by Bernal Díaz, a humble foot soldier who arrived in Mexico with Cortés in 1519 and took part in toppling the Aztecs. Díaz looks back on those days in The Conquest of New Spain, a first-person account written as an old man living on a modest farm in Guatemala.

But if Xenophon and Díaz warrant mention, where are the likes of Otto von Bismarck, Winston Churchill and Henry Kissinger? Where would our understanding of the rise of Germany be without Bismarck, the diplomatic and military trials of World War II without Churchill, or the Soviets, Mao and Nixon without Kissinger? Their extensive memoirs were written in part to contribute to history, but also as a personal defense against future historians. This dynamic — the statesman as historian — would have been a fascinating one for Burrow to explore.

The book ends by discussing history's changing nature in today's highly visual world, along with the advent of the Internet. Burrow astutely recognizes Ken Burns' U.S. television series on the American Civil War for what it is — a trailblazing masterpiece, "matching the scale of events it recounted in a way no printed book could do." As Burrow suggests, this is just part of a broader shift in the way the past has come to be packaged. When Burrow was a boy, he learned Latin and translated the Roman historians Livy and Tacitus. Today, children still learn about, say, the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans under King Leonidas stood up to several thousand invading Persian troops, refusing to retreat and meeting certain death. But now their source is Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, the movie it inspired, or the video-game tie-in, not the original account by Herodotus. On one level this is lamentable, but at least this tale of extraordinary heroism lives on, and children continue to be moved by the self-sacrifice of the Spartans.

Surely this is what history at its best is all about — an ability to entertain and edify at the same time. Otherwise, it risks becoming irrelevant, except in the ivory tower. Burrow does a noble service by dusting off the giants of the past, the most brilliant of them as fresh, exciting and immortal as Shakespeare or Tolstoy. But it is up to us, as readers, to keep their achievements alive.

• DAVID WORTH
• John Burrow's quirky, fascinating book looks at 2,500 years of the historian's craft