'This is a very good book indeed; general readers, students, and specialists alike will read it with profit and delight. Luke Pitcher ranges over ancient historical writers, both Greek and Roman, from Herodotus to Ammianus, with an impressive grasp of his material, and he has a gift for finding the telling example and making subtle and insightful points with lucidity ... Read moreand punch. He also has a wonderful eye for the modern parallel, and one is as likely to find here illumination drawn from a Patrick O'Brian novel or an episode of Doctor Who as from an extract from Xenophon or Velleius. Pitcher is unusually sensitive to the narrative strategies of the ancient historical writers, and also of all the health-warnings that the modern student needs to bear in mind when reading their works. Few writers about ancient historiography are so learned, and even fewer carry their learning so lightly: this is a book that anyone interested in ancient history just has to read - and they will thoroughly enjoy it.' - Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford; 'Luke Pitcher has written an engaging, witty, and accessible study of the complicated relationship between theory and practice in the ancient historians, bringing to the task an impressive expertise in texts that range from archaic Greece to late antiquity. He resists simple contrasts between ancient and modern, presenting the reader instead with finely drawn, convincingly argued analyses of the spectrum of practices employed by ancient historiographers in their treatment of sources, self-presentation, and narrative modes of (re)presenting their pasts. Bearing in mind always that the modern student of the Greco-Roman world is also, in some way, 'writing ancient history', Pitcher brings us much closer to the methodologies and reception of these texts through which so much of our understanding of the ancient world derives.' - Christina S Kraus, Professor of Classics, Yale University Show Less