In these stories, Sansom's vivid and varying characters peel back the many layers of the winter month, from a lonely mother to a guardian angel, a pest-controller to a bar-bar-bar owning brother to a baker selling lockdown sourdough kits, these snippets of lives are revealing and beautifully familiar.

One of the most famous writers of all time, George Orwell's life played a huge part in his understanding of the world. A constant critic of power and authority, the roots of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four began to grow in his formative years as a pupil at a strict private school in Eastbourne. His essay Such, Such Were The Joys recounts the ugly realities of the regime to which pupils were subjected in the name of class prejudice, hierarchy and imperial destiny.

The product of a lifetime's research by one of the subject's most esteemed experts, this is the epic, revelatory story of the Greeks and their global impact, told as never before.