Rigmaroles

Henry Day: Ibn Battutah’s travels, 15 December 2005

The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah 
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
Murray, 333 pp., £20, March 2005, 0 7195 6225 2
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... in a long line of distinguished Muslim geographers stretching from al-Masudi (888-957), the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs’, to King Roger II of Sicily’s court cartographer al-Idrisi (1099-1166) and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Ibn Battutah’s younger contemporary who wrote the vast work of historical sociology known as the Kitab al-Ibar. It’s ...

Hotsdoogs

Neal Ascherson: Travels with Norman Lewis, 5 June 2025

A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis 
by Norman Lewis, introduced and selected by John Hatt.
Eland, 502 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78060 231 8
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... in England’s rural Essex that he chose finally to settle.Travel writing is a trade older than Herodotus. It’s about ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’. It’s designed to amaze, to bring back accounts of strangeness, especially human strangeness, from far places. Sometimes it feeds escape fantasies about happier, freer lands on the ...

Steampunk Terminators

James Stafford: Europe’s Holy Alliance, 20 March 2025

The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation 
by Isaac Nakhimovsky.
Princeton, 314 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 0 691 19519 3
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... its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe. In a continent already suffused with premonitions of its own decadence, the purification promised by exertions of Russian power was a serious temptation. The ...

Born on the Beach

Josephine Quinn: Ancient Coastlines, 14 August 2025

The Ancient Shore 
by Paul J. Kosmin.
Harvard, 399 pp., £37.95, November 2024, 978 0 674 29624 4
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... this. As Paul Kosmin points out, ‘history begins on the shore, and there it finds its limit.’ Herodotus, the first to record the results of historical ‘inquiries’ in the late fifth century bce, begins by surveying a series of legends of Phoenician, Trojan and Greek sailors kidnapping each other’s women from the shoreline: these he says helped his ...

Of the Mule Breed

David Bromwich: Robert Southey, 21 May 1998

Robert Southey: A Life 
by Mark Storey.
Oxford, 405 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 19 811246 7
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... his Life by printing Bagehot’s gloomy reflection on the author of the History of Brazil, ‘the Herodotus of the South American Republics’: As if his epics were not already dead, and as if the people who now cheat at Valparaiso care a real who it was that cheated those before them. Yet it was only by a conviction like this that an industrious and ...

A Sense of Humour in Daddy’s Presence

J.L. Nelson: Medieval Europe, 5 June 2003

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe 
by Patrick Geary.
Princeton, £11.95, March 2003, 0 691 09054 8
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Europe in the High Middle Ages 
by William Chester Jordan.
Penguin, 383 pp., £9.99, August 2002, 0 14 016664 5
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... Equally ancient are the conceptions of ethnicity discussed in the rest of Geary’s book. Herodotus, ‘the father of History’ (a.k.a. ‘the father of lies’) who was actually the first ethnographer, had a quite exceptionally ‘broad and non-judgmental’ view of ethnic identity, based on culture rather than biology. His perspective, Geary ...

Case-endings and Calamity

Erin Maglaque: Aldine Aesthetics, 14 December 2023

Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher 
by Oren Margolis.
Reaktion, 206 pp., £18, October 2023, 978 1 78914 779 7
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... Philosophy (1497), Metaphysics (1497), Moral Philosophy (1498). Thucydides’ Histories (1502), Herodotus’ Histories (1502). Plays by Aristophanes (1498), Sophocles (1502), Euripides (1503). The Iliad and the Odyssey (1504). The works of the Greek orators (Demosthenes in 1504, anthologies in 1513). The complete works of Plato (1513). He was so busy that ...

Story-Bearers

Marina Warner: Abdelfattah Kilito, 17 April 2014

Je parle toutes les langues, mais en arabe 
by Abdelfattah Kilito.
Actes Sud, 144 pp., €19, March 2013, 978 2 330 01634 0
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... spoken in Eden before Babel. He alludes to some of the historical suggestions: according to Herodotus, the pharaoh Psammeticus decided to conduct a scientific experiment by plucking two newborn babies from their families, handing them over to a shepherd, ordering him never to speak to them and to keep them in solitary confinement, with only a nanny goat ...

Diary

Alexander Clapp: Inside Golden Dawn, 4 December 2014

... back and joined him. Something was loudly discussed. The lecturer stumbled through the rest of his Herodotus sermon. Then I saw the chapter head pick up the phone. I grabbed my bag, dashed past the soldiers, out the stairwell and ran down the street. I took three different cabs home. I haven’t been ...

Plato’s Friend

Ian Hacking, 17 December 1992

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 520 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 7011 3998 6
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... who holds the stage, than the chatter of the prophetic birds in the nearby oak tree mentioned by Herodotus, the one replanted for us in sweet memoriam by French ...

Rich and Poor in the Ancient World

Fergus Millar, 17 June 1982

... loose and self-indulgent; in his incapacity to resist an interesting byway he more resembles Herodotus than Thucydides, whom (along with Aristotle) he so much reveres. On the other hand, it is precisely this width of reference, both ancient and modern, which contributes most to the book’s uniquely personal tone. What I have said about the book above ...

Against Michelangelo

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Pinecone’, 11 October 2012

The Pinecone 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 332 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 571 26950 1
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... the Greek testament … at sight … read any easy prose Greek author, as Xenophon, Lucian, Herodotus and also Homer … then all the usual common Latin schoolbooks … to read at sight Virgil, Horace, Caesar’s Commentaries … you should be able to write pretty correctly Latin prose – and a Greek play or two should be added. It was ...

Those Limbs We Admire

Anthony Grafton: Himmler’s Tacitus, 14 July 2011

A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ ‘Germania’ from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich 
by Christopher Krebs.
Norton, 303 pp., £18.99, June 2011, 978 0 393 06265 6
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... clear. Like other ethnographers, Tacitus wrote in a tradition, one that went back to Hecataeus and Herodotus, more than half a millennium before him. For the most part, Tacitus did not draw on the first-hand reports of Roman travellers and soldiers, but recycled commonplaces. When he described the Germans’ settlement patterns, way of life and religious ...

Can you spot the source?

Wendy Doniger, 17 February 2000

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 
by J.K. Rowling.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £10.99, July 1999, 0 7475 4215 5
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... for children, but the story she tells is widespread in other cultures, too: the birth of Cyrus in Herodotus, of Krishna and Karna in the Hindu tradition, not to mention Superman in American comics.Rowling brings new life to the old chestnut. At the end of the first book,* Harry learns from the good wizard Dumbledore why Voldemort’s successor could not kill ...

Life after Life

Jonathan Rée: Collingwood, 20 January 2000

An Essay on Metaphysics 
by R.G. Collingwood, edited by Rex Martin.
Oxford, 439 pp., £48, July 1998, 0 19 823561 5
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The New Leviathan 
by R.G. Collingwood, edited by David Boucher.
Oxford, 525 pp., £17.99, March 1999, 0 19 823880 0
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The Principles of History 
by R.G. Collingwood, edited by W.H. Dray and W.J. van der Dussen.
Oxford, 293 pp., £48, March 1999, 0 19 823703 0
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... slackness, Collingwood’s tale of the development of European historical knowledge from Herodotus and Thucydides to Croce is impressively clear. And his description of history as the ‘re-enactment of past experience’ provided a crisp formulation of the historian’s dilemmas in applying present forms of understanding to a past which may have ...