Josephine Quinn talks to Stephanie Merritt

The roots of Western civilisation lie in ancient Greek and Rome, and values like freedom, rationality, justice, democracy and tolerance originated in the West. But what if that’s not true? Covering 4,000 years of history, Josephine Quinn calls for a major reassessment of the West, arguing that many of the values we hold close are not only or originally western, and that the West is a product of longstanding links between a large group of cultures, from the Gobi Desert to the Atlantic Ocean, Scandinavia to the Sahara. Quinn, a professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, puts forward a rich new narrative that has the power to change how we see the world.