This book is full of generalisations and the biggest is ‘Europe’. Most of us know what we mean by the word but in every respect it is hard to define, beginning with the geographical. It is only a continent because Europeans decided on the continents. If Africans or Chinese had named them according to the dictionary definition of ‘a continuous expanse of land’, there would be only Asia from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Those who define the eastern boundary of Europe as the Urals have never seen them. The highest summits are less than 2000m.

What you understand and mean by Europe depends on your generation and your nationality. It can mean Western Europe, the European Union, the territory represented by the Council of Europe from Iceland to the Caucasus. For two generations it meant that part of Eurasia not controlled by the Soviet Union. In Britain European can simply mean foreign. Intellectuals in the pay of the European Union and the Council of Europe agonise in vain on their behalf to come up with a definition of a uniquely European social, political and cultural identity that will embrace Cypriots and Czechs, Belgians and Bulgarians. Paradoxically many include diversity and change as defining characteristics of Europe. It may seem nonsensical to be united by diversity, anchored in change – and you could say the same about Asians or Africans - but it is essential to bear them constantly in mind when looking at the Europe we live and work in....

There are many ways to carve up Europe according to climate, topography, physical and agricultural resources and so on. This figure is based on the oceans and waterways of Europe. What are often thought of as natural frontiers, barriers to communication, are in fact highways. Rivers, seas and mountains are avenues of commerce and cultural interchange. Combined with similar geographic environments they create trans-national cultural regions whose inhabitants have more in common with each other than fellow citizens in their respective hinterlands. Mountain shepherds in Northern Greece have more in common with Bulgarian and Albanian shepherds than with the plains people of the shores. The traders of Greece have more in common with the traders of Turkey and Italy than with the mountain dwellers in the hinterland. Catalonia and Euscadi (Basque territory) are on both sides of the Pyrenees, Savoy and Piedmont are on both sides of the Alps...