Where do you study? ls dasha Holland leads me away from the Persian reliefs to the Egyptian mummies. He tells me that he picked up Herodotus as a schoolboy, hoping for dramatic accounts of pitched battles. There is plenty of that in the final three books – “The Lord of the Rings stuff,” as he describes it. But beforehand we have nearly 400 pages of backstory about Greece, the Persian Empire and its domains, including a whole book on the “marvels and customs” of conquered Egypt.