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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sentence he wrote daily to the Messenger and began to read: everything. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herodotus, Gandhi, H.G. Wells, the history of Nat Turner, all 11 door-stopper volumes of The Story of Civilisation by Will and Ariel Durant. ‘Many who today hear me,’ he said proudly, ‘will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade.’ He plundered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”