Justin Marozzi > Quotes

“The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic.”
― Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History

“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds - some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians - may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought each other. There it is. The birth of history in a paragraph.”
― Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History

“From the 1070s, instability in the Holy Land deepened. In 1071 an army led by the Seljuq commander Alp Arslan, or Heroic Lion, routed Byzantine forces at the Battle of Manzikert, in what is eastern Turkey today. The battle, which marked the beginning of Turkish ascendancy in Anatolia and the slow decline of Byzantium, was a cataclysmic defeat. Humiliatingly Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was captured and taken prisoner.”
― Justin Marozzi, Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped Civilization?From Mecca to Dubai

“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, Intentions (1891)”
― Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History