What is Europe? When was Europe? This book offers a panoramic overview of the entire course of the European past, from prehistory to the 1990s. Its absorbing narrative lays down the chronological and geographical grid on which the dramas of European history have been played out, and tells many of those stories, human, national, and continental. It brings back into focus areas often ignored or misunderstood, remembering the statelss nation as well as the nation-state. Each chapter contains a selection of themative capsules, zooming in on topics ranging from erotic graffiti at Pompeii to the psychoanalysis of Hitler; and concludes with a wide-angle `snapshot'of the whole continent seen from a particular vantage point. Norman Davies's masterly history reveals not only the rich variety of Europe's past but also the many and rewarding prisms through which it can be viewed.