the communist bloc. "I wasn't politically won over. I was never in the category of those who were tempted to believe that stuff," he says. By implication, some historians were. We each recall with a shudder Christopher Hill, a historian who was also a communist party member and master of Balliol College, Oxford. "He was seriously dangerous, ideologically," says Davies. As a young man, Davies was "collecting languages" and one of them was Russian. At a Polish-Soviet border crossing, however, he was refused entry in the 1960s into the Soviet Union. He stayed in Poland and soon began the research that led, during the next two decades, to White Eagle, Red Star (1972), a history of the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-20, and to God's Playground . . . . It takes a while for the first course to arrive but I interpret that as a good omen. Sure enough, it is a feast of Parma ham, mozzarella, beef carpaccio, bruschetta and grilled vegetables, all sprinkled with shavings of Parmesan. Giorgio pours two glasses of Sister Moon, an intense blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot produced in the Tuscan hills. I ask Davies about Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011), his most recent book , whose paperback edition is just out. It ranges from the Visigothic kingdom of Tolosa, in what historians used to term "the Dark Ages", to places such as Borussia, Etruria and sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, a region that now forms part of Ukraine but enjoyed a