How the World Made the West: A 4,ooo-year history

REVIEW BY ANDREW SELKIRK Every year Professor Quinn has the task of sorting out applications from those wishing to study classics. Many of them say that they wish to study classics because Greece and Rome are ‘the roots of Western civilisation’. In this book, Professor Quinn disagrees. Who is right? Quinn, who has just been stolen from Oxford for an even more prestigious chair at Cambridge, set out her academic stall in her previous book In Search of the Phoenicians, where she offered a new take on this much-debated subject, suggesting that ‘The Phoenicians did not in fact exist as a self-conscious collective or people’. The term ‘Phoenician’ itself, she says, is a Greek i