Be careful what you wish for

Back in August last year I was bemoaning the fact that there wasn't a Folio edition of Herodotus.

Back in November I got a copy of Victor David Hanson's 'A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Sparta Fought the Peloponnesian War' and - as any fule kno - we owe almost all our knowledge of that conflict to Thucydides.

So what dropped through my letterbox yesterday? A breathless promotion of "The Fathers of History in two magnificent New Folio Editions" bound in gold-blocked cloth with binding designs based on relief sculpture from Athenian monuments of the fifth century BC, set in Poliphilus ..... yada, yada, yada ......

It is really impossible for me to resist beautiful twin editions of Herodotus' "The Histories" and Thucydides' "The History of the Peloponnesian War". Today my pocket book is about seventy quid poorer so that soon my bookshelf may be a little richer.