Europe

John Andrew Boyle describes how, for many years during the mid-thirteenth century, Mongol forces which had already driven deep into Central Europe, threatened to over-run and obliterate the Christian civilization of the West.

D.M. Nicol assesses Justinian's valiant attempt to restore the splendours of Imperial Rome, by turning back the clock to the days of Augustus, and making the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, concluding it “was impractical and largely a failure. But it was a glorious failure."

The monarchs of the East had developed an effective technique of establishing control of the Greek cities by volunteering to “liberate” them. This was a method, writes E. Badian, of which Roman statesmen quickly learned to take advantage.

Had these early artists a purely practical aim? Or were they inspired by a true creative impulse? “This conflict” writes Jacquetta Hawkes, “exists only in the mind of the disputants.”

John B. Morrall describes how worldly learning and a reverence for Christian tradition were combined in the character of “one of the best of the Renaissance Popes.”

Jacquetta Hawkes explains how, at an unpromising period in human history, a sudden upsurge of creative power produced the earliest masterpieces of European art.

Both before and after the fall of the Republic, Roman satirists give us an extraordinarily vivid picture of the society in which they lived, with its materialism, its opportunism, its unceasing pursuit of power and wealth.

Joanna Richardson explains how, in Brazil, Damascus and Trieste Isabel Burton accompanied her husband on many of his travels and was his devoted business manager.

Charles Johnston describes how, in the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire was near its end, but its sophisticated life found a lucid recorder in Ammianus of Antioch. 

Though originally seen as ‘monstrous excrescences of nature’, Ronald Rees writes, mountains came into their own during the eighteenth century and began to inspire poetic awe and reverence.