It’s a crying shame Literary Review wasn’t around in tenth-century Baghdad. How much one would have enjoyed cracking open the magazine to see reviews of such new books as The War of Bread and Olives, Adultery and Its Enjoyment, Stories about Slave Boys and the succinctly titled Masturbation – all tomes relished by the courtiers of the caliph of Islam in that gilded age in the city’s history.

The title of Bartle Bull’s new book, Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq, may be less salacious than those of the forgotten classics he cites to evoke the louche milieu of Baghdad in its medieval heyday, but it certainly conveys a sense of ambition. Indeed, initially one might wonder if the scale of Bull’s ambition can be reconciled with his hope of producing a readable book.

This is for two reasons. First, Iraq as a state within its current boundaries is a post-First World War creation. For many centuries, the territory that now forms Iraq was part of other empires, the centres of which were often elsewhere – from the 16th to the 20th centuries the