As a child I found it hard to believe that the world east of Bethlehem was real at all. This was a region where fire might fall from Heaven on the prophets of Baal, or angels appear overhead, or seas divide and then close again over your head.
The atlases and encyclopaedias in which I buried myself were concerned mostly with our islands and the Empire, or what had until recently been the Empire. In them, even continental Europe was misty and exotic. I would later be faintly surprised to find that legendary cities such as Prague and Moscow actually possessed the banal characteristics of any other place: pedestrian crossings, suburbs and traffic police.
