John Julius Norwich (1929–2018)

This massive tome is an absurd object, projecting a dry scholarly air and suggesting to all passersby that they dare not disturb you, an obvious intellectual. In fact, this book is the product of one man's obsessive curiosity with an unlikely and little known period of history during which the Normans of all people rose to the level of royalty in Southern Italy.

This is a rollicking and irreverent history set in a time of frequent assassinations, poisonings, plots, crusades, and pontifical show more schisms. The author's voice is confident, entertaining and with a strong sense of purpose. Let him be your tour guide through a couple hundred years of medieval history. He'll tell you all the best gossip and point out picturesque landmarks along the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read and it satisfied my curiosity after reading The Mistress of the Art of Death, set in this same period. show less

This book is bad on so many different levels, many of which simply derive from the fact that the concept of the book itself is irretrievably poor. Let's see, how about I write a book about the 5,000 years of civilizations bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Included will be Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the rise and spread of Islam .... You get the idea, and the author was able to fit all of that in the first 86 pages!!!

As a result, we're left with writing that looks something show more like this: Caesar conquered Gaul. He returned to Rome and entered an alliance with Pompey and Crassus. Crassus went to Syria where he was defeated and killed by the Parthians. Pompey and Caesar had a civil war. Caesar chased Pompey to Egypt where he seduced Cleopatra. He returned to Rome where he was killed in the Senate. Mark Antony and Octavian avenged Caesar, then had their own civil war. Octavian won, changed his name to Augustus and became Emperor.

There, the last twenty years of the Roman Republic in one paragraph, mission accomplished. If that's the kind of writing you enjoy, and you don't already know the most basic historical background, then have at it.

Added to the faulty concept, is a very informal and borderline inappropriate writing style which detracts from the work.

I must say that after the initial 100 pages, wherein the author tears through 3,500 years of ancient history, things do improve, however not to the point of presenting a rational, well presented view of regional history.

In the Introduction, the author himself states, "...how could the whole thing possibly be compressed into one volume?" IT CAN'T, and therein lies the problem. I've thought that perhaps it could be helpful for a junior high student with no background in history whatsoever, but upon reflection, any effort that attempts a history of Ancient Greece in nine pages, the rise of Islam and the succeeding Caliphates of Damascus, Baghdad and al-Andalus in 14 pages and, believe it or not, Ancient Egypt in two pages, should best be left alone. show less

I remember loving John Julius Norwich's books about Byzantium as a teenager: big, sweeping epic histories with lots of drama and adventure and some slyly funny asides. Reading The Middle Sea told me that I can never go back and re-read them because I would find them far more tarnished works than they are in my memory. Now, with many more years and training behind me, I can see how shallow are the foundations on which Norwich builds his narrative: the assumptions and generalisations (often show more gendered, almost always racialised), the thin bibliography, the Eurocentrism, and on and on. Norwich's prose is still pleasurable and there is something of the raconteur here that's appealing. But to the old saw about how you should never meet your heroes should perhaps be added one about never going back to re-read their work, either. show less

The idea of this book sounded good, if a little ambitious - a collection of short essays by distinguished experts presenting a global overview of the role of particular cities in history from ancient times until 2009. But in practice, it turns out that the essays are simply too short (1000-1500 words) for most of the experts to get around to saying anything really interesting about their cities before the editor's red light comes on. And there's no real attempt to draw any general show more conclusions from what they say - Norwich's introductions to each of the five broad time periods are brief and do little more than touch on some of the big historical themes that are important for the period. After reading it, I discovered that the book was originally issued by Thames & Hudson in a big, glossy coffee-table format with lots of pictures, which would make a lot more sense for such a book than the later "compact edition" in which I read it, with illustrations at the rate of only about one to every four essays, gathered into blocks of colour plates.

That's not to say that it's a complete waste of time - whilst many of the contributors waste precious space telling you what you almost certainly already know (Rory Maclean reduces Berlin to little more than a truncated Wikipedia entry), others, like A. N. Wilson on London or James Cuno on Chicago, have more instinct for the form and manage to home in on non-obvious details that tell you something relevant about their cities. Norwich - as you would expect - has claimed Constantinople, Palermo and Venice for himself, and of course does a very nice job of condensing the thousands of pages he has written about those cities to three or four each. show less