Exhibition: Magnficient Maps, British Library

Maps, in chronological terms, are better at telling us where we've been than where we're going; their evolution says less about geography than it does history.

They were not so much the product of assiduous draughtsmen as narratives created by artists who exploited the creative guidance granted by their patrons.

For the understandable open-mouthed wonder which greeted these mini-masterpieces of scholarly and artistic endeavour allowed for a disreputable ruler to slip in some propaganda unnoticed. That is the message of this compact but neatly formed exhibition.

The size, placement, grandeur and detail of maps all contained a subliminal but unavoidable statement.

There is a Lear, a Robin Hood, a James Bond for every era, they say. Maps are even more telling of an age. The coastlines and rivers may stay the same - to within a certain degree of a cartographer's pen. What is contained within the features, however, is very human and not always reliable.

Head of map collections at the British Library Peter Barber said: "Maps are pictorial encyclopedias that are about far more than just geography. The artistry of the maps is subjective and like the teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down, tries to persuade us to swallow a particular political message."

Some of this spinning is free from any duplicity. Take, for example, the 1877 Serio Comic War Map by Fred Rose, which depicts Russia as a grasping octopus, a visual metaphor used 70 years later by Vichy France to show Churchill's imperial inclinations. Or the delightful - and less demonic - Tea Revives The World map of 1940.

A marvellous, understated and charming exhibition at the British Library puts the "power, propaganda and art" in context, and in appropriate settings, to highlight how maps have been used to underscore ambition, indicate status or make a satirical point.

This is why these 100 maps, dating back to Roman times, have been selected out of BL's exhaustive 4.5million-strong collection.

Through the centuries, the maps show the receding boundaries of human ignorance - the monsters of unknown lands disappear and a move towards faithful projection emerges.

But along the way to accuracy, there have been some wonders: the seven foot tall Klencke Atlas; the Chinese globe of 1623; the haunting Mappa Mundi; the Psalter world map of 1265 which stood in Henry III's bedchamber.

You will never quite see maps the same way again. Perhaps just as well.

– From May 2010