Understand people through the history that shaped them.
Pick a nation, faith, people or region. You'll get the big ideas in five minutes, the story from its formative moments to today, and sources you can follow up.
Europe
Catalonia
A Mediterranean people with a thousand-year-old sense of itself, a language that survived a dictatorship, and a society split almost down the middle over whether its future lies inside Spain or outside it.
England
An old country that rarely talks about itself, fond of understatement, queues, pubs and self-mockery, still working out where Englishness ends and Britishness begins.
France
An old nation that reinvented itself as a republic of ideas, proud of its language, its table and its arguments, and still wrestling with the memory of defeat, empire and who gets to count as French.
Germany
A young nation with an old, many-centred culture, which has made facing the darkest chapter of its past part of who it is, and is still learning to be one country after forty years apart.
Ireland
A small island with a long memory, a huge scattered family, and a habit of talking its way through hard things, now one of the most open societies in Europe.
Italy
A young state made of ancient cities, where family, food and beauty are taken seriously, the state is not, and every town is sure it is the real Italy.
Northern Ireland
A small place with two big stories, British and Irish, learning to live with a third, and famous for dark humour, warm welcomes and the hardest-won peace in Europe.
Poland
A nation that was wiped off the map and refused to disappear, shaped by faith, freedom and two powerful neighbours, and now one of Europe's great success stories.
Roma
Europe's largest minority, a people with roots in India and six centuries in Europe, scattered across every country, bound by family, music and memory, and still fighting to be seen as they are rather than as the stereotype.
Russia
The world's largest country, with a great literature, a hard history and a deep habit of endurance, whose people and whose state are not the same thing.
Scotland
An old nation inside a younger union, proud of its schools, its stubbornness and its sense of fairness, still arguing, mostly good-naturedly, about whether to go its own way.
Spain
An old crossroads of Christians, Muslims and Jews that built a world empire, tore itself apart in civil war, and reinvented itself as one of Europe's most open, sociable democracies, while still arguing about what "Spain" means.
Ukraine
A people who kept their identity alive for centuries under other people's empires, and are now fighting to keep the state they won.
Wales
A small, singing, stubborn nation of the original Britons, which kept its ancient language alive next door to the most powerful neighbour imaginable and has recently found its own political voice.
Middle East
Armenians
An ancient people of the highlands below Mount Ararat, the first to make Christianity a state religion, scattered by genocide across the world, and still gathering around the same table.
Egypt
The "mother of the world" on a ribbon of the Nile, more than a hundred million people carrying seven thousand years of history, a deep faith, a sharp sense of humour and a hard daily struggle.
Iran
An ancient civilisation that kept its language and its poetry through every conquest, a people of deep hospitality and dark humour, and a society that has long been at odds with those who rule it.
Israel
A young state built by an ancient people coming home, argumentative, warm and restless, carrying the Holocaust, its wars and 7 October, and still at odds with the people it shares the land with.
Kurds
One of the largest peoples in the world without a state of their own, divided by borders among four countries, and still singing about the mountains.
Palestinians
A people rooted in olive groves and old towns, scattered by war across the world, holding on to land, memory and each other through occupation, exile and the devastation of Gaza.
Saudi Arabia
Guardians of Islam's holiest cities, a desert society of tribe, family and fierce hospitality, transformed by oil in two generations and now changing faster than almost anywhere on earth.
Turkey (Türkiye)
A people who came from the steppes, built an empire on three continents, rebuilt themselves as a republic, and still argue passionately about who they are, over endless glasses of tea.
South Asia
India
The world's most populous country and largest democracy, an ancient civilisation of hundreds of languages and every major faith, still arguing, loudly and lovingly, about what it means to be Indian.
Kashmir
A Himalayan valley of saints, poets and craftsmen with a written history going back nearly nine centuries, claimed by two nuclear powers and still waiting to be asked what it wants.
Pakistan
A young country on an ancient river, founded in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims, now 240 million people arguing passionately about what that homeland should be.
East & Southeast Asia
China
One of the world's oldest continuous civilisations, carrying a long memory of greatness, a sharp memory of humiliation, and a lifetime of change packed into every family.
Japan
An island nation that has reinvented itself again and again, from samurai rule to industrial empire to pacifist democracy, while holding on to a deep sense of courtesy, harmony and the beauty of passing things.
Koreans
One people in two states and a worldwide diaspora, carrying an ancient script, a Confucian sense of family, the scars of colonialism and war, and the restless energy that made the South rich and famous in a single lifetime.
The Philippines
Seven thousand islands, more than a hundred languages and one enormous extended family, shaped by Spain, America and Japan, held together by faith, humour and a diaspora that spans the world.
Tibetans
A people of the high plateau, about seven million strong, whose faith, language and memory of self-rule survive under Chinese government at home and in a close-knit exile spread from India to New York.
Uyghurs
A Turkic Muslim people of the Silk Road oases, heirs to poets, saints and twelve great suites of music, whose homeland is now the most heavily policed region of China.
Vietnam
A long, narrow land shaped by a thousand years of Chinese rule, a century of French colonialism and thirty years of war, now young, fast-growing and fiercely proud of having outlasted every empire that came.
Africa
Ethiopia
One of the world's oldest Christian kingdoms and an early refuge for Islam, a land of more than eighty languages that beat a European army at Adwa, keeps its own calendar, and starts every visit with coffee.
Nigeria
Africa's most populous country, a union of hundreds of peoples and two great faiths, scarred by civil war and bad government, and bursting with ambition, humour, faith and music.
South Africa
A country of twelve official languages and many histories that ended apartheid by negotiation, wrote one of the world's most progressive constitutions, and is still working out what freedom should mean for everyone.
The Americas
Brazil
A continent-sized country built by Indigenous, African and European hands, shaped by the longest slavery in the Americas, and famous for a warmth and joy that live side by side with deep inequality.
Mexico
Heir to ancient civilisations and to Spain, forged by conquest and revolution, living next door to a superpower; warm, proud, devout and funny, and deeply attached to family.
United States
A young country built on old land and a big promise, endlessly arguing with itself about who that promise is for.
Faiths & peoples across the world
Buddhism
A path, more than a creed, begun by a teacher in ancient India who said suffering has causes and can end, now followed by over 300 million people from Sri Lanka to Japan to California.
Catholicism
The world's largest church, about 1.4 billion people from Manila to Kinshasa to Chicago, bound together by the Mass, the sacraments, the saints and the successor of Peter in Rome.
Hinduism
The world's third-largest religion, about 1.2 billion people, with no founder, no single book and no church, held together by shared stories, gods, festivals and the idea of dharma.
Islam
A faith of about two billion people, from Morocco to Indonesia to Michigan, built on one God, one book and a daily rhythm of prayer.
Jewish people
A small people of about sixteen million, at once a family, a faith and a culture, held together across three thousand years by a book, a calendar and the habit of remembering.
Orthodox Christianity
The Christianity of Byzantium, the Slavs, the Balkans, Ethiopia and the Middle East, some 260 million people who pray before icons, keep the old fasts and believe heaven touches earth in the Divine Liturgy.
Protestantism
The many churches born of the Reformation, from Lutherans and Anglicans to Baptists and Pentecostals, some 800 million people who hold the Bible as their final authority and trust in grace received by faith.
Sikhism
A faith of some 25–30 million people, born in Punjab five centuries ago, built on one God, equality, honest work and a free kitchen open to all.
Nothing matches yet. Try another name.