Our perception of time is not linear, but logarithmic. It feels as if every new day were shorter than the previous day. Today, at 40, each year passes almost unnoticed and I struggle finding a significant event to stamp on every single year, lest it gets lost in nothingness. Thus, for many of us, it …
Yesterday, December 24 at 11:48 at night, I finished reading the third and last volume of Byzantium. It is a story whose melancholy increases as we flip the pages. In this last volume, the Empire is like a bonfire (or a pyre?) whose refulgence is still intense and bright by the time of the arrival …
This is volume II of III of the history of the Byzantine Empire. This volume, unlike the first one, covers a relatively short period of time: from the year 800 with the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Western Empire to Easter Day 1081, when Alexius Comnenus takes the reins of Byzantium. The Empire …
“Our civilization has never adequately acknowledged the debt it owes to the Empire of the East”, writes John Julius Norwich in the introduction of this magnificent book. In very rare occasions, historians rise to the level of the history they are narrating. This is one of those occasions. We jump on the glorious vessel captained …
There is nothing I can add to what has already been written about The Odyssey, and there is little I can say about my reading this classic poem. It was a long overdue debt with “literature.” A checkmark on a list of titles that the scholarly-bent reader thinks is required to enter the dignified club …