Let James Holland take you to places in history. You've never been before.

The Savage Storm is the fascinating new book which brings to life the story of our Allied forces

as they crossed into southern Italy in 1943.

With unflinching and insightful detail, Holland places you in the heart of the action of this most pivotal

and brutal battles of the war with Germany.

The Savage Storm is out now in hardback and available from all good bookshops.

Dawn in the city by the river. As the streets come to life, you haul yourself up from the gutter.

Your name is Bassim Ibnisak and once when your father was working on the great Mosque of Samara,

you might have been somebody. But he was cast into exile and died a poor man.

And you have grown up here in the streets of the old capital, a beggar and nobody, a thief in the shadows of the ninth century.

Already the streets around you are bustling with people, the uncounted souls who live here in the round city.

Merchants and traders, hawkers and hustlers, slave girls and soldiers from every corner of the earth,

from the shores of Africa, the deserts of Arabia, the frozen wastes of the north, the far steps of the east.

This is the city founded by the Caliph Al-Mansur, home to a million people.

This is the city of peace, the greatest, richest, most colourful, most popular city on earth.

This is Baghdad.

So this is the setting for the video game Assassin's Creed Mirage, which is out, Tom, as you will know, at the end of this week.

And we talked in our library of Alexandria episode about this franchise.

They've sold more than 200 million copies and they have these very intricately designed historical settings.

But never I think one more colourful or more exciting than this ninth century Baghdad.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because you alluded to the one in Alexandria.

What do they have? They've had one set in French Revolutionary Paris.

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