At home: a short history of private life. Bill Bryson. 2010.

The history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened.

Houses aren’t refugees from history. They are where history ends up.