THE Swindon Festival of Literature brought its second night to a close on Tuesday with a visit from former Sky News Foreign Affairs Editor, turned author, Tim Marshall.

Following a television career spanning 29 years spent reporting from 30 countries, Tim has recently written a book – not about himself or his former profession, but about maps and how they can inform our understanding of the world.

In ‘Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that tell you everything about the world’, he looks at how the unchangeable features of coastlines and plains and mountains and rivers have influenced the geopolitical arena we find ourselves in today.

During his talk at the Arts Centre, Tim took the audience on a canter through regions from the Arctic, to the Russia-Ukraine border and down to the Middle East and Africa – although it felt as if he could quite easily have filled the hour exploring just one of them.

Maps, it turns out, can tell us a great deal about why countries act as they do.

Take, for example, the proximity of Russia’s northern coast to the ice packs of the Arctic and the way that constrains their ability to project year-round naval power.

Follow that observation to its eventual conclusion and you find yourself in Crimea, south of the Ukraine, where a year-round Russian naval base was established and where its forces are projecting power and influence in an effort to prevent its loss.

Follow the tricky sea route down from that same port across the Black Sea, through the narrow Bosphorus strait and between the Greek islands and it soon becomes clear why Russia has interests in a different conflict area – Syria – where they have another naval port, this one with far easier access to the crucial Mediterranean Sea.

Such trains of thought, illustrated by the maps that are at the core of his book, kept the audience engaged from start to finish.

Tim’s talk was almost entirely free of the anecdotes and stories from the frontline one might expect from a former foreign correspondent.

He gave the impression that he found that sort of self-aggrandisement a bit clichéd and so had chosen to focus on researching original topics of interest rather than writing just another book about covering wars.

Tim's next title, ‘Worth Dying For: The power and politics of flags’ is due out later this year.

Reflecting on the full house for the event, festival organiser Matt Holland said: “Sometimes I take a punt on something different when I think people might be interested in it.

“It’s a lovely feeling to be proven right.”