“... most of his facts come from his reading. Urne-Buriall draws on dozens of sources, from Homer and Herodotus to Cardano and John Stow, which Browne meticulously references in more than a hundred notes. He paid no mind to the divisions of knowledge of our more specialised age. Examining the urns and their human ashes leads him to consider how past civilisations ...”

“... with background’. This reticence is surely not as unique as Auerbach claimed – Herodotus is a great rationer of explanation, for example – but it achieves its best-known form in the family stories of Genesis. The paratactic verses with their repeated ‘and’ move like the hands of those large old railway station clocks that jolted ...”

“... Bible, where it features as a bellicose but impressive kingdom to the east. Susa is mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo, and by Milton in Book Three of Paradise Regained. It would take the decipherment of cuneiform, however, for any Elamite history to come to light. Sumerian scribes referred to the land immediately to their east using the logogrammatic sign ...”

“... at its dedication, pointed out, was the ‘immortal field’ at Marathon, which we read about in Herodotus. Between the ancient Greeks and modern times we seem to have been perfectly happy to let fields of slaughter revert back to being fields of wheat or pasture. Why we should no longer be so is a big question. In part it is the anxiety of erasure that ...”

“... cliché: public school and Oxbridge-educated, rushing to his death with a head full of Horace and Herodotus. Not quite, though: he was born a US citizen. In January 1915 the 17-year-old Fernald was in a train carriage full of British soldiers wanting to know why he wasn’t in uniform. ‘On learning that I was an American,’ he wrote to his aunt in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took place on the north shore of the Black Sea from the seventh or sixth century BC. At first, as Herodotus suggests, the Greeks registered this difference as amazing and unfamiliar, but did not express it in terms of human ‘value’. It was the Athenian playwrights during the Persian Wars who demonised non-Greek peoples, attributing to them vices ...”

“... between the static or indolent East and the dynamic, progressive West goes all the way back to Herodotus and Aristotle. Trotsky, however, made specific reference to Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, which appraised Asia by reference to what it lacked when set against the European model of development: feudalism, the rise of the ...”

“... in their different way the truths about power that Canetti was seeking. His favourite historian is Herodotus, a storyteller, with whom it hardly matters whether the story told is factually true or not, because it is always true to the psychology of the society it relates to. Conversely, he has little use for Aristotle the rationalist, who is more interested in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”