Sweeping in ambition and scale, Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury Publishing) tackles the history of climate change and how it has shaped human history over a 5,000-year period. Lest this sound too forbidding, be assured that the book is brilliantly shaped throughout by the human touch – including a caliph who ate 40 aubergines in one sitting, illustrating how food choices are shaped by climatic circumstance every bit as much as by periods of imperial flourishing.