Abulafia also refreshingly Ward-Perkins & Heather Pilled; the Roman Mediterranean was an immensely complex and advanced civilizational ecosystem, and after the 5th century, it fell off a cliff. ‘Dis-integration,’ as Abulafia heads his chapter.

Abulafia gives tantalizing glimpses throughout of the deeply unique weirdness of Sardinia. A sort of Mediterranean Basque country. Would like to learn more about it.

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Abulafia gives a great account of the quotidian treasures of the Genizah documents, a trove covering centuries of correspondence stored at a Cairo synagogue. Letters from Maimonides and Judah Halevi; but perhaps even more important, an inside view of medieval trade and banking.

Popes: ‘Men of Christendom, you’d better not be making ducats hand over fist with the greatest enemies of the Faith.’. Venice, Pisa, Genoa:

Worth thinking of ‘ChiMerica’ and Western trade with China in the context of Mediterranean West’s trade with the Muslim Med; obviously their greatest geopolitical rival, yet they traded like hell with each other.

audience of general readers, really for the first time since Norman Stone’s (fine, but half a century old) history of the Eastern Front, which was very much focused on Germany v. Russia.

Lloyd’s ‘Eastern Front’ volume is really the greatest service he’s performed to WWI history IMO; the Western Front, sure—he covers it brilliantly. But he’s brought the complex story of the still-very-much-History-you-Can-Use Eastern and Balkan theaters to a wide Anglophone.

if you’re read a lot on the subject, you’ll learn a lot from Lloyd’s narrative and his (occasional, and never obtrusive) opinions and judgements.

Really highly recommend Lloyd’s work-in-progress WW I history. His third volume will be Middle East (and, I’m assuming) ‘Rest of World’—Subsaharan Africa, Tsingtao, the naval campaigns and battles, etc. If you’re new to the subject, you’ll get a richly enjoyable education; even

Thompson’s book is a really tremendous history of Italy’s WW I. And Nick Lloyd’s great multi-volume history of WW I covers the Italian Front in his ‘Eastern Front’ volume (slightly odd putting it there, as he acknowledges, but he couldn’t fit it in his first, ‘Western Front’ one)

Daniel Craig “strips Bond of his unflappable archetype and leaves him worrying about his prostate and his Men’s Mental Health.”. Larry rightly rates Brosnan’s Bond highly. ‘Goldeneye’ tremendous, but I’d put a word in for ‘Die Another Day’…Just as a point of order.

2029. President Vance has appointed turrible tao to the chairmanship of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Friday in the 4HL you can really feel the pull of the long weekend Steppin’ Out.

The 1st century AD Latin poet Lucan, writing on the vast foreign population of Rome: “The city is no longer native Roman, but the collected refuse of humanity: such a hodgepodge of races that we could not fight another civil war even if we wished to do so.”.

Earlier this year the LRB reviewed a new Mark Antony bio; the Classicist reviewer closed his essay with ‘Look I know professional historians aren’t supposed to do this, but just watch James Purefoy in HBO’s ‘Rome’—that’s probably what Antony was like in real life.’ 🤣🙏🏻💪🏼

He keeps doing this! 😅🤣.

This is why 7 October was such a problem for the US Left; the Internet and the ‘Real World’ fused, and people could see that a lot of the actually-not-very-fringe Left got really excited about seeing white people running for their lives and being dragged into captivity.

[the explosion of social media-as-news-aggregator gives Americans an open-kimono view of the American Left’s collective id]. [American Left, 2025] ‘We need to let our freak flag fly on social media. Professionally. This is how we win elections.’

So true. Over the last 10 years I’ve often thought that the biggest problem for the American Left was that not enough average Americans could go on the Internet and see what American Leftists really thought about race, immigration, sex, and average Americans.

Tarquin Nasheed