The book is subtitled ‘How Portugal forged the first global empire’ and that gives an accurate summary of its contents. What it doesn’t convey is the sheer, breathtaking excitement of it all. Over the space of a few decades, a group of Portuguese navigators transformed the whole idea of the world, opening it up in a way that had never been achieved, even in the antiquity that Renaissance humanists so revered. They had outdone the ancients. Roger Crowley, one of my favourite historians, tells the tale with all the excitement and verve these extraordinary men deserve. Few things can match the raw courage of the Portuguese turn into the empty ocean that took them round the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. For, to make the journey possible, Portuguese navigators realised that it was no good to hug the African coast all the way south. Instead, you had to sail west, into the empty ocean, far far from any land, and then catch the trade winds south and east, past the Cape of Good Hope and into the ocean of wealth. For the Indian Ocean, and the trade it carried, was the richest in the world at the time, and the Portuguese arrived determined to grab this trade for themselves. For the Muslim traders who dominated the seas, their arrival was a rude shock (as indeed it was for the Venetians, who suddenly foresaw their domination of trade with the east undercut). The story of these conquerors, and in particular of Afonso du Albuquerque, the Duke of Goa and the man who founded the long enduring Portuguese enclave there, is extraordinary. Highly recommended.