books

marcus aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors, wrote one of the final classical books of stoicism. The Greek title, Ta Eis Heauton, simply means “To Himself”. Someone, somewhere, sometime used  “Meditations” as the title, and it stuck. Meditations is essentially a notebook of the Roman Emperor. It is

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,

and then, gradually and inexorably, the fire begins to fade, and worse: the flames are not extinguished by themselves or by the Islamic powers of Asia but by their Christian brethren of Europe

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

"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.

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 of literarte.