Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Josephine Quinn: “One of the big ideas behind her book is that civilisation/culture (the terms are not exactly interchangeable) has evolved through a process of exchange and communication linking human communities over millennia and across vast tracts of land and sea. Civilisation is at once an amorphous but unified whole, and a conglomeration of thousands of separate cultures, in each of which shared elements are differently combined. (1/2)