Over the preceding two centuries, Ellis notes, a number of English, Scottish, and French thinkers had generated a large body of political knowledge that undermined the medieval worldview about government, society, and even human nature itself. Further, that the American people were the beneficiaries of this accumulated wisdom – “it had yet to be called the Enlightenment,” Ellis reminds us – which, although it had its origins in Europe, was now destined to enjoy its fullest implementation in America…

They were also a PR dream. Initially working for her future husband, Robert Love, the young and pretty Nancy Harkness was hired to demonstrate and sell airplanes. Predicted to replace the family car, the private plane was seen as the wave of the future. If women could fly it, the perception was, anybody could. What Love thought of all of this malarkey, the cheesecake photographs and press coverage, is hard to determine.

The inhumane acts committed by both sides in this war equal the most heinous crimes of history. The hate was uncontrollable. The Indians sought revenge and a return to their way of life before colonization, and the New Englanders felt they had God on their side. The renowned Puritan preacher and scholar Cotton Mather asserted that “. . . the Evident Hand of Heaven appearing on the Side of a people whose Hope and Help was alone in the Almighty Lord of Hosts, Extinguished whole Nations of Savages.”

Some say that the story of the Kingdom of Fanes is an epic that goes back to the Bronze Age in the Dolomites. How could such a story come down to us? No one in those parts knew writing, three thousand years ago or more. We don’t even know what languages people spoke then in the Dolomites. And what kind of kingdom could that have been?

For English-speaking peoples, 1066 and 1776 still evoke powerful recollections of liberty lost and freedom won. For most people in the West, however, 711 hardly strikes a note of any significance. But it should, for that was the year when a small force of Muslim Arabs and Berbers from Morocco crossed over from North Africa to Spain. Islam reached Europe in 711 and the world has never been the same.

But as we travel further and further from established trade routes, things become hazier. The Caspian Sea is a blob, Madagascar has acquired an odd right arm, and India, well, India sprawls across the east, stretched and mutated into an obese mermaid’s tail. Now and again familiar names pop out – Java, Cathay – amidst imaginary islands and an eastern ocean scattered with what looks like the flotsam of a broken continent.

By the closing years of the 18th century the stage was set for a major international confrontation over the Pacific Northwest Coast. Imperial Russia controlled the untamed Alaskan wilderness, Spain was expanding its holdings north from Mexico, Captain James Cook had claimed Northwest America for Great Britain and Captain Robert Gray had discovered the Columbia River, the historical basis for the United States’ claim to the river and the extensive watershed that extends eastward far into Montana.

Meanwhile, walls of buildings were rising, mud roads were being paved, library books were being delivered on horseback, archaeological digs were being excavated, and Orson Welles was directing an all-black version of Macbeth set in the Haitian jungle. Along with the carpenters and secretaries, painters, sculptors, writers, and actors had also joined the ranks, though with some confusion on how one measured an artist’s full working week. The WPA was feeding a need, both for the individual and the community.

A favourite theme which recurred again and again in wall paintings was the satyr creeping up behind a nymph to catch her by surprise. In at least one case the nymph, her veil ripped away, turns out to be a hermaphrodite, to the satyr’s theatrical dismay, and the observer’s amusement. Some wall paintings showed homosexual sex and, because African motifs were popular, another depicted picnicking pygmies enjoying a group orgy under a tent.

Filettino was not always a happy place, in history or in fiction. In the time of the Caesars the people here were Aequi, an Italic tribe of rough herders whom the Romans subdued with difficulty. For many centuries, probably millennia, the Aequi practiced transhumance, leading their herds over the Serra in late autumn to spend the winter in pastures in the Liri valley far below, and returning to the uplands for summer.