Tom Holland

• “Nobody in the West really gives a shit. And the reason nobody gives a shit, as a Yazidi refugee I spoke to said, is that in the West you have Christians, you have Muslims, you have Jews who all speak up for their co-religionists, but who cares about the Yazidi? Who cares about them?”

• “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity.”

• “Rare was the royal genealogy that had not born witness to the fecundity of Woden.”

• “Favours and the threat of force: such, as they had ever been, were the essence of successful kingship.”

• “That a union as long-lasting as that of Great Britain might fray can hardly help but serve as a reminder that the joining of different peoples in a shared sense of identity is not something easily achieved and maintained.”

• “Any attempt to extrapolate from the minimal evidence available a thesis as to Athelstan’s sexuality would be as anachronistic as it was nugatory.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Tom Holland across IJR