★The first global, non-fiction epic to trace the three-thousand-year story of poison. Written with a journalist’s cool detachment and a novelist’s narrative drive, it turns the history of toxins into a sweeping, worldwide documentary.
★From ancient Greece’s hemlock and Rome’s lead-sweetened banquets, through medieval alchemists’ arsenic powders, to the Cold-War laboratories that brewed “Novichok,” discover how poisons—unseen—have steered empires, philosophers, and poets alike.
★Twenty pivotal lives—Cleopatra, Socrates, Stalin and more—entwine with poison, revealing its unique role where power meets thought.
★Zero fiction: every episode rests on archives, trial transcripts, declassified files, or first-hand recollections, making the book both a riveting read and a scholarly resource.
★Part encyclopaedia of toxins, part psychological atlas of human darkness—ready-made for screenwriters, game designers, or museum curators.

Renaissance physician Paracelsus left us a chilling maxim: “All things are poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” Guided by that sentence, this book turns its lens on the darkest corners of history—poison itself. Chronologically, it charts toxins from ancient hemlock and lead-sweetened Roman wine, through medieval alchemists’ arsenic, to Cold-War nerve agents. Scene by scene, it then zooms in on the people: inside Cleopatra’s chamber where a snake became her last bargaining chip; beside Socrates as hemlock chilled his thoughts to stillness; in Stalin’s Kremlin after his death, where whispers of poisoning filled the power vacuum.

No legends are embroidered, no scenes invented; only documents, artefacts, and the words of those who were there. The result is a stark portrait of humanity and poison: toxin as the coward’s weapon, the tyrant’s sceptre, the conspirator’s code, and the scientist’s scalpel. When you close the book, you realize the true chill comes not from the poisons, but from the human hearts that choose, again and again, to use them.

Kirill Borisovich Privalov – Russian writer, international-affairs correspondent, and radio host. Long-time foreign correspondent for *Literaturnaya Gazeta*. Fluent in Russian and French; author of nearly twenty books spanning historical non-fiction, cultural essays, and international politics. In *A Brief History of Poison* he marries journalistic detachment with literary force to create the first global documentary of toxins across three millennia.