When it's good, a tarte tatin is divine: buttery pastry soaked in caramelly appley juices, sweet-tart tender fruit – the whole much greater than the summed parts.

Secondly, in terms of geopolitics Central Asia was a huge sea of barbarians set in the midst of interlocking continents. Thanks to its border on the Siberian forest in the north, it was open to barbarian incomers who would upset existing polities and set migrations going.

The monks grow large quantities of artichokes, lettuce, and fennochio; and interspersed among the beds of vegetables are orange and other fruit trees, and little trellises of cane, wreathed with the young, downy leaves of the vine.

1993, Don Munday, Tin Dog, Damper and Dust, autobiography.