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1 " The tale of someone's life begins before they are born. "
― Michael Wood , Shakespeare
2 " The theologian and the executioner have been intimates throughout history. "
― Michael Wood , In Search Of The First Civilizations
3 " People are far too quick to judge others, especially when they don’t have the full facts.--from the book For Reasons Unknown "
― Michael Wood
4 " Meanwhile, new ideas crept like a damp stain into the very fabric of Tang culture, casting a shadow across the world of the old aristocratic clans that had survived. "
― Michael Wood , The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream
5 " there are no devils. Inhumanity is the real evil, "
6 " Everyone knows the feeling of excitement on discovering a book that unlocks the imagination; it enables us to inhabit another world - of heightened language, thought and ideas. Great literature holds the seed of a kind of liberation that remains with us throughout life "
7 " Our search begins in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. ‘Chichi’ is one of the market towns in the highlands of the Quiche Maya. Chichi itself was a Mayan settlement before the Spanish Conquest; its two "
8 " He is not didactic, like Sidney or Jonson. He doesn’t tell you what he thinks, or what you should think, and he never preaches. Rather he sets up oppositions, multiple viewpoints, and then holds his mirror up to nature. "
9 " Tonally, the jagged syntax of ‘Inch-thick’, the Ovidian lyricism of ‘O Proserpina’ and Autolycus’s bawdy swagger show Shakespeare at his widest-ranging. This is total mastery. Nobody had taken the English language further, and nobody has done so since. "
10 " Liberty did not on any account mean license. "
― Michael Wood , The Story of England
11 " The lake district's rain was the price you paid to live amongst such beauty. "
12 " The rebel groups were loosely coordinated, inspired by millenarian hopes for the coming of the Maitreya Buddha and Manichaean-tinged beliefs about the imminent arrival of a saviour, a prince of light, who would defeat the powers of darkness. "
13 " century law code; the predecessor of Southampton was Hamwih; "
― Michael Wood , In Search of the Dark Ages
14 " In the third millennium BCE, modern archaeology has shown that there were indeed thousands of villages and dozens of small ‘states’ dotted across the river valleys of central China, rectangular walled towns of rammed earth, each with its own ruler. And in that period our narrative begins. "
15 " So the Yellow River is a constant, unpredictable and often terrifying character in the story of China, nothing like the benign life-bearing flood of the Egyptian Nile, whose rising was celebrated each year with unerring predictability on 15 August, or the Tigris in Mesopotamia, whose summer rising was greeted into the twentieth century with liturgies and food offerings, even in Muslim households. "
