The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World – the sequel to Prisoners of Geography

by Tim Marshall

This is dangerous for the regime because laughing at the revolutionaries is a revolutionary act in itself, and one it cannot prevent.

the concept of martyrdom runs deep in their culture;

to compromise is sin, to resist is divine.

(I hasten to assure Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith that I harbour no such treasonable ambitions.)

Ibn Saud had united Saudi Arabia by force of arms; to hold it together he then married a daughter from each of the defeated tribes and senior religious families. He had about twenty wives but, in accordance with religious law, never more than four at a time. The result was more than 100 children and the creation of a family network which dominates the state.

Top tip: if you go to Saudi Arabia in the height of summer, take a jacket – the hotels are cold.

The fictional Asterix the Gaul gets all the headlines, defending a tiny piece of territory in what is now France, but he had nothing on the Celtic Britons.

Henry’s main claim to fame is having had six wives.

As the philosopher Plato put it in an indelicate phrase, ‘What the Greeks borrow from foreigners, they perfect.’ What they perfected has given us so much, for example Hippodamus, the father of urban planning; the great philosophers such as Aristotle; in medicine, Hippocrates; in mathematics, Pythagoras; and the world’s first known female mathematician, Hypatia. An estimated 150,000 English words derive from Greek, democracy, acrobat and sarcasm among them.