Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political play... See more
Edmund White • The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus
Geoffrey Parker, his best biographer, finds an answer in late twentieth-century “prospect” theory: leaders, it suggests, risk more to avoid losses than to achieve gains.76 Given the empire Philip inherited and then expanded, he had a lot to lose. What’s strange, though, are the risks he ran to regain territories he hadn’t lost. It wasn’t Philip’s f
... See moreJohn Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
The impact of empire
Mary Beard • SPQR
Russia was – perhaps after 1700, certainly after 1762 – always one of the five or six great powers of Europe who made up the quarrelsome management committee of the continent’s affairs. It became, after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia, and a colossal colonialist.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation’ of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units
... See moreJohn Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
Pavel Florensky
David Bentley Hart • The Story of Christianity
When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the two figures chosen to represent England and France in great mock-ups were the sixteenth-century rival kings Henry VIII and Francis I.