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“... According to the hype for this excellent biography of Colin Turnbull, he was one of the ‘most well-known anthropologists’ of the 20th century, along with Margaret Mead and Louis Leakey. For many of the more austere members of the profession, to say that these three are ‘well-known anthropologists’ is a bit like saying that Vanna White is a well-known lexicographer ...”

“... I am personally more attracted by Susan Forward’s modestly presented case-histories than by Robin Fox’s pretentious fantasies, but there is more meat for discussion in the latter’s argument, so let us start there. Once, long ago, Robin Fox was trained as a British social anthropologist. He has published ...”

“... In the 1964 film Robin and the Seven Hoods, when someone compares ‘Robbo’ (Frank Sinatra) to Robin Hood, one of the gangsters asks: ‘Who’s Robin Hood?’ And another replies: ‘Well, he was a hood, some Englishman who lived long ago and had an operation going for him in the forest ...”

“... Christians really so different and, if they were, how and why? This is the principal question Robin Lane Fox sets out to answer in this compelling and readable book, which is also a major work of historical scholarship. It is a study of differing and competing religions in the second and third centuries AD: not so much ...”

“... biographies to appear in the same season, both by authors who have personally surveyed his route. Robin Lane Fox has covered the whole itinerary, in this surpassing the redoubtable Sir Aurel Stein, who had to wait till he was in his eighties for permission to enter Afghanistan, and, setting out undaunted, died amid the ...”

“... those by his near contemporary Hesiod) and the archaeology of early Greece. In Travelling Heroes Robin Lane Fox tries to bring together texts and objects to shed light on the real-life travellers who, he believes, shaped the worldview represented in early Greek epic. He starts with Hera’s flight and asks where the ...”

“... the shadowy figure who was later largely credited with those foundations, or perhaps, as Robin Lane Fox suggests in The Invention of Medicine, may even have been Hippocrates himself, just as the Greeks suspected. Doctors today speak not only of a Hippocratic oath but a Hippocratic face (distorted by the approach ...”

“... she struggled to find adequate translations for such ‘semiarchaic’ words as honour and renown. Robin Lane Fox thinks that Simone Weil’s conception of elemental ‘Force’, which turns humans into objects, is too reductive to apply to Homer’s heroes, but on rereading Weil’s essay on the Iliad I shared her sense of ...”

“... the ‘clearness of style and modesty of temper’ he found in the Anabasis, a judgment that Robin Waterfield’s new translation doesn’t traduce. Xenophon’s relatively simple sentences, preference for the vivid present tense, and use of third-person narration inevitably invite comparison with that other great classical war reporter, Julius ...”

“... Among the testimony of others (former nuns, social workers), we are given an account by Robin Fox, editor of the Lancet, written after a visit to Mother Teresa’s ‘operation’ in Calcutta. Dr Fox, although favourably disposed towards Mother Teresa’s work, found that medical facilities for the ill and ...”

“... of them also wrote for the Ashmolean catalogue, as did the editor of the Brill’s Companion, Robin Lane Fox. Lane Fox opens the volume with a thorough and highly combative defence of the attribution of Tomb II to Philip II. Combativeness is perhaps a natural trait in a historian who ...”

“... that its details have been rigorously checked by scholars of the most impeccable credentials. Robin Lane Fox famously advised on the Macedonian phalanx for Alexander, in exchange – it has been reported – for a bit-part in the cavalry charge. Even the ghastly Troy (which was about a mythical war in any case) set ...”

“... you? Shall I tell you the secret? My whole life. Answers when mussels bud from every tree when the fox lies down with the goose when the sun and moon dance on the green and oranges fruit in the bramble bush when all streams run together when all the streams stand still when the cuckoo calls in winter and water rolls back to the top of the hill when herring ...”

“... going round her field faster and faster till she bolted straight into the stable wall. I saw a fox with a firebrand tied to its tail going over the high cliff, bundled in flames. And off to the west, a funeral procession on the side of a hill where no road lay. Three months under winter; until winter broke. They tested the loch with their toes: the ...”

“... may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about evidence and historical truth, not about faith. It is unauthorised because it addresses questions which the Bible itself ...”