Brazil

One of the earliest leper hospitals in Britain was built in London near the beginning of the 12th century by Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I. It was a benign combination of housing, hospital and chapel, with patients free to come and go as they wished. Matilda started a fashion among the wealthy, so that by 1350 there were more than 300 such hospitals across the kingdom. Far from lepers being shunned and feared as outcasts, therefore, their treatment for much of the medieval period was enlightened. ‘The mythology of the “medieval leper” seems no more real than that of the vampire or ghoul,’ writes Oliver Basciano. The author

It is easy to assume that there is not much to be said about the history of the Atlantic before 12 October 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas. In 2005, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn published a little book entitled Atlantic History: Concept and Contours which said absolutely nothing about what happened before Columbus, whom he barely mentioned. Atlantic history meant for Bailyn, and the growing mass of Atlantic historians, the story of modern contacts between the four continents that face the Atlantic, especially the nefarious slave trade linking Africa to the Americas. Earlier centuries were seen as the fishing-ground of fantasists, who looked for ancient Egyptians or Irish

Joe Boyd’s masterly history of what some of us still defiantly call World Music – more on which later – takes its title from Paul Simon’s ‘Under African Skies’, but is really less about the roots of rhythm than its routes. A typical chapter will start with a song from a particular geography, then wind the clock back to the country’s history, then forward again to show how that history has contributed to the development of its music, and finally move outwards, following the trade winds as they carry the sounds around the world. The Argentine singer Carlos Gardel urges the young Frank Sinatra to turn from crime to music Thus