There, the magically scented and featherlight resin known as amber, released by the thawing of ice far in the north, washed up on beaches “rather as polythene bottles do today”.From references to Pytheas by later geographers, we know that his book described the rich pickings to be had from the tin mines of Cornwall and the amber beaches of the north. He also described local craft – hide boats with 16 oarsmen that crossed across the Irish Sea – and the midnight sun “The barbarians pointed out.. places where the sun lies down… the night is extremely short: two hours in some places, three in others.”Most marvellous of all, and quite unbelievable to Polybius (who fingered the scroll of On the Ocean in disbelief 100 years later) was Pytheas’s description of the “congealed sea”, those parts “where neither earth was in existence by itself nor sea nor vapour, but instead a sort of mixture of these rather like a marine lung in which… the earth and the sea and all things are together suspended”.Cunliffe believes there were copies of On the Ocean in the magnificent libraries at Pergamon and Alexandria. When these treasure houses of learning were destroyed, On the Ocean, like so many other texts of which we now know only the name, disappeared from view. But for a while it was widely quoted, sometimes at second or third hand, by later writers.

As Cunliffe explains, many had a very different world view and declared Pytheas to be an outright liar. But Geminus of Rhodes (c.50AD) quoted from him with confidence and Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, accepted him “as an entirely reliable observer”. Pliny cites him as an authority in three of the 37 books in his Natural History.But the idea that Pytheas was “the ancient world’s Columbus” is not convincing. He did not “discover” Britain; he happened on a collection of islands with flourishing industries and established trading posts They evidently already had plenty of satisfied customers.

His real originality lay more in the fact that he was not just courageous enough to venture very far north indeed, but learned enough to write down what he saw.That doesn’t make this story any the less interesting. Cunliffe wears his learning lightly, bringing to life such famous classical names as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Aristotle and Pliny as if he knew them personally, and convincingly recreating the mindset of an explorer in the third century BC. Cunliffe is a hands-on academic, and some of the most fascinating parts of the book are his descriptions of sites that he himself has excavated in Jutland, Cornwall, Brittany and the south of France.. It is rare for a man to admit to a propensity to tears, rarer still when that man is a scientist brought up in an age when crying was seen very much as a sign of weakness. But for Dr Colin Murray Parkes, the psychiatrist who helped set up counselling for bereaved British families in New York following the 11 September attacks, tears have never been a source of shame.”I think we all cried at one time or another,” says Dr Parkes, 73, a world expert on bereavement who has worked as an adviser in the aftermath of many British disasters. “It was a very moving, sometimes devastating experience for everyone, including the counsellors.”
Within days of the attacks, the Foreign Office asked Cruse, the bereavement charity of which Dr Parkes is president, to provide a team of counsellors to fly to New York to support the relatives of British victims arriving in the city.

It was the first time that a government had made such a request and backed it up with full financial support. Ten counsellors flew out in the first week; three are still there.One of the first places Dr Parkes visited on his arrival in New York was Ground Zero itself. “One felt slightly embarrassed to be a sightseer,” he says, “though we weren’t really sightseeing, of course. We were there because we knew that one of the first things bereaved families would want to do is to see the place where it happened – and we wanted to be sure that if they were taken there, they weren’t going to see any remains.”Dr Parkes found understandable variation in the reactions of the families he met. “There were some who were obviously very broken up, and finding it hard to cope,” he recalls. “Fortunately, everybody understood that there was no need for them to be embarrassed if they were crying.