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“... Howls​ of rage greeted the new concrete paths that were laid over the notoriously treacherous rock of the Acropolis last year. Increasing the numbers the site can handle arguably brings visitors closer to the experience of visiting it in the fifth century BCE. At the height of the glory of classical Athens, built on empire and slavery, the sacred area would have been bustling with people ...”

“... My first visit​ to the British Museum was on a date, and under duress. My objection wasn’t to elite cultural institutions or stolen goods, but to visiting a museum about Britain. I was studying classics to get away from all that. I can still remember the bewilderment of walking into those first long galleries with their five-legged bulls and giant stone kings ...”

“... The​ Syrian oasis town of Tadmur is close to the middle of nowhere, 140 miles east of Damascus, 125 miles west of the Euphrates, and 20 miles from the nearest village. It’s famous for two institutions established under the French Mandate at the turn of the 1930s. One is the archaeological site now known by the Greek name of Palmyra, until recently one of the most extraordinary survivals from the ancient world ...”

“... In​ 1982 a sponge diver spotted a ‘metal biscuit with ears’ on the seabed off the southwest coast of Turkey. It was a copper ingot from what is now known as the Uluburun ship, a single-mast sailing boat built of cedarwood from Mount Lebanon, which sank around 1300 bce. The wreck was lying at a depth to which archaeologists could safely scuba dive for only twenty minutes at a time, twice a day ...”

“... One problem​ with writing about the lives of Greek and Roman women is that the Greek and Roman men who wrote about them first tended to be more interested in writing about other men. As a result, famous ancient women are usually famous because they had more famous male relatives. The protagonists of the ten books so far published in Oxford University Press’s series on ‘Women in Antiquity’ include a bishop’s mother (Monica), a tribune’s sister (Clodia Metelli), an emperor’s mother-in-law (Faustina I), a king’s daughter (Arsinoe) and, with some double counting, no fewer than eight politicians’ wives ...”

“... Sometime​ in the late 160s CE, the Roman doctor Galen suffered a great misfortune: the loss of almost all his slaves to a disease he called (in Greek) ‘the protracted plague’ – a term used for any major epidemic. In a treatise discovered in a Thessaloniki monastery in 2005, Galen boasts that he was not at all moved by this tragedy, nor indeed by one far worse in 192, when a fire destroyed his library ...”

“... Highway​ 90 follows the Great Rift Valley from Jerusalem down to Masada alongside what’s left of the Dead Sea, making it the lowest road on earth. On the right, sheer cliffs hide the caves of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. On the left, over-extraction from the River Jordan upstream and mineral harvesting from the inland lake itself means that the shoreline is receding, by two kilometres in some places since the 1980s, revealing cracked mud, salt flats and dead beaches ...”

“... The Fall of Rome​ is the historic catastrophe of Western civilisation. It ushered in an era when, as Petrarch put it in the 14th century, even the eyes of talented men ‘were surrounded by shadows and dense fog’. These new Dark Ages reversed the standard medieval metaphor in which the light of Christianity had banished the shadows of the pagan era, and set the scene for Petrarch’s own project, a renaissance of classical culture ...”

“... Christian evangelicals​ in the United States sometimes like to identify the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test ...”

“... child sacrifice, temple prostitution and necromancy.There is just one problem with this picture, Josephine Quinn tells us in her extraordinary book, In Search of the Phoenicians: ‘They did not in fact exist as a self-conscious collective or “people”.’ Quinn’s central claim – that the concept of ...”

“... new wife, soon to call herself George, was 25. Ezra Pound, best man at the wedding, wrote to John Quinn in New York to say that he had known Georgie Hyde-Lees as long as he had known his wife, who had been her best friend; he found her sensible and thought she would ‘perhaps dust a few cobwebs out of his belfry. At any rate she won’t be a flaming ...”

“... a counter-skinhead, mainly Asian gang in Birmingham called the Lynx, he was drawn to the Anthony Quinn movie about the birth of Islam, The Message, with its portrayal of seventh-century Arabs as noble, chivalrous, thoughtful warriors. Begg denounces terrorism – ‘senseless acts of murder . . . carried out by desperate mujahedin’. But early on in the ...”