Or consider the recent history of Belovezhskaya Pushcha, a forest park straddling Belarus and Poland.

ECONOMIST: The environment and people power

Mr Rakowski was usually seen as an arch-trimmer, a prime example of the collaboration forced on Poland by its history.

ECONOMIST: Mieczyslaw Rakowski

The charity claims Shaikh has always maintained he went to China to start a career as a pop star, despite no history of public singing, having previously lived in Poland where he tried to set up an airline.

BBC: Briton faces execution in China

"Polish opera has an emotional intensity, a resonance", said Mr Pountney, who pointed to the difficult history that Poland had endured under long periods of foreign domination.

BBC: Welsh National Opera boss awarded for promoting Poland

The difficulties of writing this type of history are extreme when a single volume of just over 300 text pages has to cover a diverse continent from Ireland to Poland, from Bergen to Palermo, over a period when it was changing so fast.

ECONOMIST: Medieval history