Part of the travels is extracted from a year Marozzi spent in Iraq on a charitable project. He tours the National Museum of Iraq, set up by Gertrude Bell, with its director, followed by a wildly uninterested grunt who sweetly tells him to ‘go ahead, man, you do your history thing. I want to make sure you’re not history.’ The soldiers are interested in death and talking about women.

Equally fine — and to me, an eye-opener — is his account of a project to counter received ignorance. In Thessalonika, a city with its own grim story of ethnic and religious bigotry, an effort is being made to examine the innate bias of history textbooks and to offer, in parallel, alternative sources and arguments for the telling of history. Its director, a Briton of Serb and Croat descent, believes that the uncritical regurgitation of nationalist woes ‘contributed enormously to the savagery of the wars in the Balkans’. Irresponsible teaching of history, he points out,

is where you instil into the young a sense of victim mentality, a feeling that everyone around them is their adversary and that’s how it’s always been.... If you tell a ten-year-old his country has always been beaten up by its neighbour throughout its history, and then ten years later it’s war, he’s wearing uniform and he’s got a gun in his hands and his leaders are saying, ‘They’re still slaughtering us,’ this is what he believes and he goes on the rampage.

Herodotus celebrated ‘the glory of human diversity’. He had the conquered Croesus tell Cyrus, his captor in 546 BC: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace — in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’ Herodotus may be a slightly flaky guide to Bodrum, but Marozzi is right to remind us that he is not yet out of date.

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