In my early teens we used to play a history game: name the period you'd most like to live in. I always ended up choosing the present. I reckoned my chances as a woman were better that way.

Steven Pinker has confirmed my instinct. In over 700 fact-laden pages he shows there is far less violence today than ever before. (That "today" includes the Holocaust, Vietnam, the 20th-century genocides and suicide bombers.) Pinker knows he's bucking the gloom-and-doom trend but he's got containers full of evidence for ammunition, plus backup from the cognitive and evolutionary scientists.

Proving things have got better turns out to be far more bracing than ushering in the apocalypse. There's irreverent relish to be had in recounting the gorier barbarities of the Bible with its 1.2 million deaths, of the Roman Colosseum, of the ordeals of the saints and of Inquisition torture. In one of his astonishing charts, Pinker ranks the death tolls of major historical conflicts, adjusted for population growth. First is the Tang Dynasty An Lushan Revolt of the 8th century (death toll in mid-20th-century terms: 429,000,000) with the 13th-century Mongol conquests close behind. The second world war, with its 55,000,000 dead, ranks a mere 9th and Stalin's purges and Gulag 15th.

So what has made human beings less violent? Pinker organises his history through six trends. First is the "pacification process": the shift from hunting and gathering to the first agricultural civilisations, bringing a fivefold decrease in violent death. Next is the "civilising process", starting in the late middle ages. Then comes the "humanitarian revolution" of the 15th to 18th centuries, gradually reducing despotism, judicial torture and duelling. Finally there's the "long peace" following the second world war and the "new peace" after the fall of communism: both periods are notable for their championing of human rights and a growing disapproval of everyday aggression. We're hardly angels yet but we have become a far less brutally cruel and more peace-loving species.

My only cavil is with Pinker's chapters on cognitive science. Here the rosy gaze on the growing humaneness of our species moves inward to mind, brain and behaviour. Pinker raises the possibility that recent biological evolution may have checked our inclinations towards violence, that somehow all our more angelic habits  delaying gratification, self-control, empathy, increased use of reason, movement away from superstition  may have had some biological effect on the hard-wiring of our brains. But the time scale of just a few centuries is far too short for the work of natural selection. Too bad. I'm sure Pinker would have liked to use it as yet more evidence in his spirited defence of modern civilisation.

Lisa Appignanesi's latest book is All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (Virago/ Little, Brown)