It is important to be reminded that philosophy of history takes in a broad span of thinking about the nature, methods and purposes of history and history making. This volume not only does this but goes one step further in both teasing out and forging new connections between ancient and present-day approaches. It also backs up the logic of its diversifying intent through a list of authors at different career points from a good range of European and North American universities.

Turner's introduction is a clarion call for the redemption of history's historicality, reminding us that there are deep traditions of thought that may have been passed over in modern efforts to stress the rigour of the discipline via the up-to-date methods and theories of other disciplines. This line of thinking opens out in F. Hartog's invitation for us to return to the idea of the historian in antiquity as investigator and as author, and to history as immanently made through those activities, rather than through a defined set of methods and disciplinary boundaries. L.P. Hemming extends this thinking by using close readings of M. Heidegger and H. Arendt to stress the political nature of history making in antiquity. This is unpacked further by A. Meeus and later by A. Kahane in their examinations of the political shaping of ancient notions of historical truth and rhetoric.

By Chapter 3, that of D.F. Kennedy, we begin to see how the ancient thought might not – and ought not – be collapsed into modern theory. This is done by reference to the writing of B. Latour, who, like Heidegger, wanted us to return to ancient thinking and to see it as needing to be re-read and re-animated in our own thought. As a demonstration of this intent, chapters follow in which J. Grethlein shows the fruitfulness of returning to Thucydides’ and Aristotle's notions of the particular and the universal for contemporary historiography, A. Damtoft Poulsen reminds us that experiential notions of history have ancient roots, and K. Clarke that notions of a gap between reality and representation took flight in shifting notions of the relationship between author and reader. Clarke's chapter is paired well with I. Kuin's examination of how Plutarch ‘broke the fourth wall,’ as we would call it, or, as R. Keen has said of Lucretius in De rerum natura, ‘put his arm around the reader's shoulder’ (Aperion 19 [1985], 1–10).

The final sections of the collection include helpful reminders by S. Tufano, J. Toner and N. Morley, respectively, of Walter Benjamin's interest in the classics; ancient notions of praxis and theoria in the works of T.W. Adorno; and the influence of Thucydides in the thinking of F.W. Nietzsche. These are interspersed with more abstract reckonings by D. Carr on the value that ancient perspectives on the experiential views of history bring to notions of phenomenology now, and by Turner on the need to historicise the history of histories. In these various ways we gain the sense of a kaleidoscope of opportunities for ancient thought to bring fresh, and daring, perspectives to modern philosophy of history.