"There is no desirability in going back to antiquity for data, because, unless phenomena be appearing now, they arc of only historical interest. At present, there is too much history." - Fort, Books, p965.

"The novel is a challenge to vulgarisation: write something that looks new to you: someone will point our that the thrice -accursed Greeks said it long ago" - Fort, p55.

"Ancient wisdom drips in a patter of slimy opinions" - Fort, p396.

On these reckonings, I must be Fort's worst nightmare. But with all respect to the master, he is inconsistent to the point of self-contradiction. The first sentence concludes a paragraph justifying his decision "to draw a Deadline, for data, at the year 1800." In practice, though, he frequently adduces material from the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, in one case (p393) going back to 1597.

Fort's prose, by turn elliptical and lush, is a constant delight. The definition of ancient wisdom as a patter of slimy opinions is no more wounding than (very much exempli gratia) calling science "established preposterousness" (p17) or knowledge "ignorance surrounded by laughter" (p. 19). Nor would an ancient Hellene he much bothered by the epithet "thrice-accursed"; it was as standard in classical and patristic Greek abuse as it is in Fort.

The present point is, Fort does make a number of forays into classical antiquity. I think I have spotted them all: there are 1,062 pages of text, and doing this monthly column has alerted me to the deficiencies of Schlanger's index.

A late chapter in Lo! (p820) kicks off with a quotation from Aristotle as modified by Hegel: "Wherever there is a conflict of extremes, there is an outcome that is not absolute victory on either side, but is a compromise" - a dogma that dues not apply to modem politics or sport.

Plato is absent, along with all Roman writers - I fancy Fort would have been much taken by the likes of Lucretius. Some lack of interest may be implied by his oddly incomplete account (pp 670-I ) of a fraudulent-looking (I told the full story in FT 135:24) modern claim to have found the lost books of Livy.

He does, though, pay tribute to Hipparchus' star catalogue (p 351), and has a neutral reference to another Hellenistic astronomer, Aristarchus (p368). Mentions in the same paragraph (p 91) of Alexander and Julius Caesar, along with "the cyclones of Egypt, Greece, Assyria," albeit casual in themselves, form part of his argument for the Super-Sargasso Sea.

A lengthy (pp147-60) disquisition on Roman and other ancient coins and inscriptions allegedly found in America includes a sentence on "the rare mintage of Domitius Domitianus, Emperor in Egypt," planted by "some joker" in Illinois. All this is part of the "data of the more than thrice-accursed" (p151 - that word again!). Fort not only knew his numismatics, he could move at once to another good question: "Where did he get a rare coin, and why was it not missed from some collection?"

As befits one who liked to joke about history, Fort was not intimidated by big names: "History is a department of human delusion that interests us. We are able to give a little advancement to history. In the vitrified forts of Europe, we find data that the Homes and Gibbons have disregarded" (p172). The reasoning of prehistorian Sir John Evans over stone implements is (p106) branded as "lamentableness".

Fort's description - pp 777-9, a sustained piece of bravura prose - of the 1872 Vesuvius eruption is so similar in both general effect and particular terms to, Pliny's (Letters, bk6 nos 16 6c 20) that I wonder if he had read this Roman's autoptic account of the blow-up of AD 79' Not an accusation of plagiarism, rather a demonstration of the same narrative gifts and eye for the telling small things -e.g. Pliny mentions stranded sea life, Fort a fallen sparrow.

Pliny wrote these letters to his historian friend Tacitus. The latter (Annals, 6k14 ch32) memorably describes prodigies presaging Boudicca's capture of Roman Colchester in AD 60. Fort (pp439-41) has a splendid account of strange phenomena over that very city in 1884. As he maintains (p7), "Our whole existence is animation of the local by an ideal that is reliable only in the universal," an opinion that surely warrants a place for ancient history in the magazine that hears his name.

"The disputes over ancient Greece are no nearer solution now than they were several thousand years ago, all because there is nothing to prove or solve or settle" - Fort, p107.