4 ideas
The past is like a deep well: drop a burning scrap of paper in and it lights the walls as it falls, shrinking until it is too small to see. Every 'once upon a time' has an earlier 'once upon a time' behind it. Counting back through parents, grandparents and their grandparents turns that abstract depth into a chain of real, countable lives.
The most consequential inventions, including speech, fire, tools, farming and bread, were made by people whose names no one will ever know. Later named heroes and empires are built on these anonymous achievements, so the history of great individuals starts very late in the human story.
Shi Huangdi, the first emperor to unify China, ordered the old history books burned around 213 BC and persecuted scholars who kept them. He wanted the past erased so that history would appear to begin with him. Gombrich uses the episode to show a ruler understanding that controlling the record of the past means controlling the present.
In 1935 Gombrich ended the book hopeful that people were becoming more tolerant and humane. He then emigrated from Vienna and lived through Nazism, the Holocaust and the Second World War. Decades later he added a final chapter that openly admits he had been wrong, while still holding that the idea of tolerance is worth defending.