Now Marie Antoinette has met her fate I've moved back to John Julius Norwich's The Middle Sea: a History of the Mediterranean. JJN is one of my favourite authors ever, so I'm reluctant to admit I'm finding it a bit disappointing. Maybe it's just not one for his fans. His three-volume History of Byzantium is brilliant, and one of the first things of his I read. I've now read it all two or three times, I forget, and I've read all his Venice and Sicily stuff. Naturally a lot of the same events occur in a history of the Mediterranean, but I can't escape the feeling that sometimes paragraphs are repeated verbatim. I think my quarrel isn't with the book itself, more with the project. Every now and then he seems to be apologising for straying beyond some undefined limit from the sea -- and given that he doesn't talk about actual sea events much it seems like an artificial sort of idea.
Still everything he's ever written has been worth reading and his Christmas Cracker compilations are brilliant. They make excellent gifts for invalids, among others.
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