If Barry Cunliffe's large and magnificent new book has a guiding motto, it is a famous sentence by Fernand Braudel about the Mediterranean, which Cunliffe applies to the whole continent and repeats several times in these pages: 'Our sea was from the very dawn of its prehistory a witness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life.'

LRB 23 October 2008 | PDF Download