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“... structures, and not those of pharaonic Egypt, provided the prototypes for the Greek poleis. Tony Martin, an Afrocentrist, was far closer to the mark than Lefkowitz and Rogers, when he wrote: ‘If any of Bernal’s Afrocentric followers had slowed down a bit in their speed-reading of Black Athena, they would have noticed ...”

“... 1780-1980’. There are 52 pages of printed text and 274 learned footnotes which take up 15 pages. Bernal could well have stopped there, but he is an obsessional. The volume under review has 1315 footnotes. The scholarship is formidable but one-sided. The Indo-Europeanists from Max Muller to Georges Dumézil and their current crop of enthusiastic disciples are ...”

“... is the point: rather than asking whether the Greeks were superior, or whether Athena was black (as Martin Bernal argued in a famous book), we need to pay careful attention to the way in which ancient people travelled, met, talked and negotiated their differences. Through that complex process of encounter and dialogue they came to a more universal ...”

“... methods is a separate issue. Four years ago, in another revolutionary work, Black Athena, Martin Bernal argued that outsiders have been responsible for most fundamental challenges to disciplines. The first interesting point about this book is that its origins are of a quite different kind. Peter James is a graduate student of University College ...”

“... Egyptian influence in Crete – no doubt for that reason, he was let off relatively lightly by Martin Bernal in Black Athena. One of the strangest claims in this litany of ‘faults’ is that Evans ‘never grew much beyond four feet’, an assertion which is glaringly contradicted by the photographs that illustrate the book (unless all his fellow ...”

“... with a young friend, Eileen Sprague, while she discussed the pros and cons of marrying Desmond Bernal – a recent Cambridge graduate. I felt sure of the outcome, and in fact they married almost immediately afterwards, when Des (as he was known to all his friends) was 21 and Eileen 23. I seldom saw either of them from then until after the outbreak of ...”

“... of the Greek genius, our collusive Philhellenism. It is very heavy artillery indeed. First, Martin Bernal’s enormous Black Athena (two volumes already, with two more to come) – a brave piece of iconoclasm that questions not only the primacy of the Greek cultural achievement over its Near-Eastern, Semitic and African neighbours, but also the ...”

“... But it is the 19th-century bias which is unfortunate. Mr Jackson quotes Prescott quoting Bernal Díaz on Montezuma’s gold, and Washington Irving on Law, when the originals would have knocked his socks off. We trudge through acres of Balzac, Dickens and, forgive the impropriety, Edith Wharton; but the problem is crystallised in Jane Austen. She ...”

“... 1981). They have since, however, been given an enormous boost by the controversy surrounding Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), described by one critic as the ‘most discussed book on the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean world since the Bible’. Bernal’s contention is that ancient Greece was ...”

“... possible. Circle, an ‘international survey of Constructive art’ edited by the architect Leslie Martin, the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo and the abstractionist Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only ...”

“... mentions Vespucci, whose accounts of his travels had been published by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in a volume that included a map christening the newly found continents ‘America’. More added detail to lend his fantasy substance, including the Utopians’ alphabet, a woodcut of their croissant-shaped island resembling maps in ...”

“... to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been ...”