Justin Marozzi on Herodotus, one of the great explorers

Justin Marozzi

Travel writer, historian and journalist whose journeys include an expedition by camel along the slave routes of the Libyan Sahara.

Justin Marozzi is a travel writer, historian and journalist. After working in the BBC World Service on ‘News Hour’ and BBC Westminster on ‘Today in Parliament’, he joined the Financial Times as a foreign correspondent in Manila, where he also wrote for The Economist. During his time in the Far East, he shared a Winnebago with Imelda Marcos, a helicopter with the Philippine president and his mistress, and a curry with Aung San Suu Kyi whilst under house arrest in Rangoon.

His first book, South from Barbary, was an account of a 1,200-mile expedition by camel along the slave routes of the Libyan Sahara. His second, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, launched in Baghdad in 2004, was the best-selling biography of the world’s greatest Islamic conqueror and a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year.

In 2006, he wrote Faces of Exploration, a collection of profiles of the world’s leading explorers. He has contributed to Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (an interview with the Afghan mujahid hero Ahmed Shah Massoud), The Seventy Greatest Journeys, and most recently The Art of War (essays on Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane).
His latest book, published in October 2008, is The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, based on extensive research in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece, one of the many highlights of which was a retsina-fuelled lunch with the nonagenarian war hero and writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.