William Hartnell Quotes

It always circled back around to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. That always fascinated me because so few people make the connection between the two.

I'm a big fan of historical fiction stuff. Historical battles - 'Gladiators,' 'The Patriot.'

I love Greek history. I love Roman history.

It all goes back to 'Wow, I never knew this about Marco Polo.' This is an incredible story and an incredible character, and such a rich world of Mongolian and Chinese culture.

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain.

Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.

Under the Julian and Claudian emperors, the Parthians seem to have been the leading power at the mouth of the Indus.

On the Italian side, we can trace the family back 2,000 years. I have a cousin in Rome, a famous archaeologist, Count Andrea Carandini, who was in Lombardy and came across some pottery with the original name of the family, Carandinus, painted on it.

It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and country, a great and wealthy city.

At a young age, when I was fascinated with China, I read 'The Travels of Marco Polo' and learned about this exciting, dramatic world he captured and reported on. He's so little known, but yet this mythology has survived that's so misrepresentative of his story.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race.

When people hear the name 'Marco Polo,' they tend to think of a map or explorer. Very few people know the true story of Marco Polo, and it's so much more compelling and exciting than the mythology.

I feel like we are reintroducing historical figures, with the explorer Marco Polo and the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongol empire, the trading place that everybody wanted to get involved in.

Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.

Eternal Rome

I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.

I have always had eclectic obsessions: astrophysics, music theory, the Mongol empire and its history, and the history of the Silk Road, to name a few.

The abundance of Roman historical mysteries contrasts with the surprising paucity of crime novels set in classical Greece.

I've been obsessed with Romans since I was a child.

Pompeii is taught at schools in England, and, for a young boy, the combination of the Roman Empire and a volcano was irresistible.