In occupied Iraq, Egypt and Greece, Marozzi finds many of the educated and powerful diminished by prejudice, imprisoned by their own partisanship, cocooned by historical ignorance. He reads Islam-bashing leaflets distributed by Americans in Iraq, listens to Greeks explaining that Turkish men are all rapists, witnesses the condemnation of women by Egyptian Islamists, and hears the pervasive chauvinism of the Balkans. Two and a half thousand years since Herodotus - 2,500 years of progress - have left the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East a hotbed of hatreds, bigotry and murderous grudges.

Yet for all his passion for Herodotus, Marozzi sometimes strains to connect him or his writing to his own experience. Little is known of Herodotus's life, nor how many of the places he writes about he actually visited. Marozzi begins in Bodrum where Herodotus may or may not have been born and finds in the hedonistic sprawl of the Turkish resort nothing but a single bust of his hero. His journey is not continuous. He spends several months in Iraq, then crops up in Egypt, then Athens, Mani and Thessaloniki. He recounts many vivid scenes. Sometimes he tries to link them to Herodotus and sometimes in the spirit of Herodotean digression, he just throws them in anyway. He talks to lots of people about Herodotus. "I love Herodotus! I adore him!" (Professor of Egyptology). "Oh, I just looooooove Herodotus!" (purring hotelier in Greece).

The great pleasure of his book comes from its focus on the text itself. In his detailed dissection of The Histories, Marozzi brings them alive. He cleverly raises Herodotus above the traditional carping about authenticity, about whether he was writing "real" history or simply telling good stories. The Greek historia does not mean "history" in the modern sense, with its courtroom emphasis on admissable evidence and reliable sources. The title, according to John Marincola's Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, should be understood as more general than that, as an "inquiry" or "investigation".

Herodotus is usually called "the Father of History" (or "Father of Lies" in Plutarch's view). In fact his place in the literary pantheon is much more interesting. He wrote of battles and politics, natural history, ethnography, architecture. But he mixed them with a host of unforgettable images, fairy-tale genealogy, incredible inventions and rites (gold-digging ants, snake-tailed women, giggling and pot-smoking Scythians, blizzards of feathers). In our literal-minded age, the elision of mythology and fact, hearsay and event, breaks the rules. But the achievement of The Histories is in the creation of something universal, an account of the contradictory nature of our beliefs and perceptions, the weird ways in which we explain the world. Justin Marozzi has done a wonderful job in reminding us of the life-affirming scope of Herodotus, his flair as an entertainer and his generous, open-hearted view of his fellow man.