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“... My parents no longer live there; I no longer live in the country. The city has become a dream. Herodotus says that the Scythians were hard to defeat because they had no cities or settled forts: ‘they carry their houses with them and shoot with bows from horseback … their dwellings are on their wagons. How then can they fail to be invincible and ...”

“... of spreading across the continent and surviving in the depths of folk memory from the age of Herodotus to that of Galileo, if not beyond? Does the remarkable similarity of ‘Animal Style’ art, whose decorative forms stretch from China to Scandinavia in a continuum where the Scythian achievement was outstanding, testify to comparable historical ...”

“... proposal is first broached in a remarkable passage at the beginning of the book which cites Herodotus to the effect that Athenians and Spartans, bound by ‘blood, language, religion, way of life’, will never turn against one another. Read ironically (and how else are we expected to read it?), this passage implies that kin groups, whatever their ...”

“... a start – with Keats and Shelley and Donne and Milton and Homer and Anacreon and Alciphron and Herodotus and Thucydides and Horace and Shakespeare and Wanley and Quarles and the Illustrated London News and Johnson’s Dictionary and the fifty-odd – very odd – volumes of the Biographie Universelle.’ This is Browningesque: this is, as it ...”

“... once ‘the capital of Egypt ... a city whose splendid temples and obelisks are commemorated by Herodotus’. Hence, perhaps, Mohamed’s pharaonic daydreams.) Ali Fayed got enough qualifications for a teaching post; moved to Alexandria in the Twenties; and taught there for the rest of his working life, eventually becoming an inspector of schools. His three ...”

“... cycle of the soul. No major chronicles appear till the 12th century, over a millennium later than Herodotus or Sima Qian, and no histoire raisonnée as a cumulative body of writing ever emerged. Gandhi’s dictum dismissing the worth of any memory of the past – ‘history is an interruption of nature’ – is a famous modern expression of this outlook. In ...”