Brown has written and spoken about the influence of the Sudanese connection on several occasions. Speaking to the "Daily Princetonian", he has remarked: "Living in the Sudan put in me a love of the Middle East, a real interest in it, distant memories of a very sunny world with large, dark Sudanese servants in long white robes", combined with memories of "hippopotami, crocodiles, and camels under starry skies". After his father had returned to Ireland, 'a handbook of "Sudanese Courtesy Customs", containing delicate Arabic phrases of greeting and polite enquiry, was prominent on his bookshelf, as was a deluxe edition of T. E. Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which I would read, from cover to cover, every time that I returned home on holiday from my school in England." Such influences, with "roots deep in my childhood, already ensured, perhaps, that both religion and the 'exotic' (the non-European and, by implication, the non-classical) were both too large, too ever-present and too rich for their intrusion into the classical world to be dismissed out of hand, as unambiguously negative symptoms of decline. The power of both had begun to puzzle and intrigue me. The collapse of an enlightened empire might, indeed, be a catastrophic event, for all I knew; but it was unlikely to be uninteresting."