“... while praising the excellence of the Greeks in speeches at once morale-boosting and cajoling. Herodotus had optimistically written of ‘the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech … and the likeness of our way of life’, and Xenophon takes up the theme. It’s significant, however, that these speeches become more frequent in the Anabasis’ final ...”

“... tossed together like a salad. Defining a genos was already a tricky business in the time of Herodotus, who was much less interested in the physical and linguistic differences between Greeks and Indians than he was in how they dealt with their dead.A culture is not a species, not even if millennia of comparative geographical isolation have resulted in a ...”

“... Georgia or Armenia, where the Ancients set the dividing-line between Europe and Asia. No wonder Herodotus himself, the first historian to discuss the question, remarked that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end – but it is certain that Europa’ – he is referring to the beauty borne away by Zeus – ‘was an ...”

“... battles on sea and land, arms and war machines, were ‘represented as if alive by the images’. Herodotus and other historians ‘seem to have done something quite useful’, Chrysoloras admitted, carefully framing the faintest praise he could find. But the power and durability of ancient art enabled the antiquarian to see the past before him. Antiquities ...”

“... about history.’ Such a turn from the personal to the ancient (history means, among other things, Herodotus) is what we have come to expect: an essay follows, devoted in part to Michael, in part to Carson’s mother, and in part to ancient writers of history and pseudohistory. Carson scatters pieces of that essay, composed in short numbered ...”

“... of the Odyssey, a long passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, tales from the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Sometimes he found Greek materials in secondary sources or read them in translation. By the end of his life, however, as he collected the masses of material that fill On the Art of Building, he was a true polymath. The most learned ...”

“... truthfulness. They begin with an absorbing, and very plausible, account of the difference between Herodotus and Thucydides. Williams argues that ‘Thucydides imposed a new conception of the past, by insisting that people should extend to the remoter past a practice they already had in relation to the immediate past, of treating what was said about it ...”

“... the Mongol and Ottoman Empires, and Bartlett explores it at length in a first chapter ranging from Herodotus to the Crimean War. The city was heavily bombarded by the British fleet, and Chekhov’s father and mother (he was not yet born) moved inland to escape the danger. At this time Tolstoy was writing his Sevastopol Sketches, and Bartlett suggests (no ...”

“... squares among windblown trees that are the remnants of the Greek grain entrepôt. This was where Herodotus encountered the Scythians, who roamed what is now southern Ukraine and provoked his thoughts on the meaning of ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’.Beyond Olbia were the choppy greenish waters of the mouth of the Buh, and, on the horizon, the gulf of the ...”

“... of topics – Kafka, Wittgenstein, 9/11, Oedipus Rex, The Matrix and Macbeth, as well as Delphi, Herodotus and horoscopes – I think it is more of a Gemini: intellectually voracious, mentally dextrous, eclectic, ‘often in two minds about things’. The end leaves no room for doubt, for the book actually splits into two voices, a man’s and a young ...”

“... of writing a biography of Parry. She never did – instead, as Pamela Mensch, she has translated Herodotus, Plutarch and others – but the interview proved ‘invaluable’ to Kanigel.Parry’s work was continued by Lord, who returned to Yugoslavia after the Second World War, managing to track down Avdo Međedović and record him again. In 1960, he ...”

“... of the past we remember and can relive in memory are usually storytellers above all: starting with Herodotus. For many of us, Hilary Mantel’s Tudors are the Tudors we know. Imaginative forms of the past become moulds that in turn press out the shape of things to come. In Nicole Krauss’s recent novel Forest Dark, the protagonist, also called Nicole, is in ...”

“... via the unknown terrain of Black Sea Asia. On the way, they encounter the same sacred mystery as Herodotus: humanity’s preposterous variousness, the substance and the salt of being. This global route away from common or species universality has been a non-stop up-country trek in that sense: away from what Marx called ‘species-being’ towards diverse ...”

“... Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.’ The distinction was fragile and questionable – if Nietzsche was a hedgehog I’m a walrus – but in any case was only a set-up for an argument about ...”

“... of his argument. In the chapter on footnotes, the texts are from Pound, the Old Testament and Herodotus, and it is in the case of Pound’s Cantos that the matter of footnotes is most prominently and arrestingly at issue. McGann describes the Cantos eloquently and, I think, accurately as seeking to ‘erect a monumental synthesis of human history and ...”