Obit: John Julius Norwich

From The Guardian:

John Julius Norwich, who has died aged 88, called himself a writer and broadcaster. He was really a man of many enthusiasms – for books, music, architecture, paintings – and his great talent was to be able to convey those passions to the public at large, through books, radio broadcasts and in nearly three dozen television documentaries from the BBC, on subjects ranging from the fall of Constantinople, through Napoleon’s final 100 days’ campaign, to Haiti’s revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture.

read more here @ John Julius Norwich and Wikipedia

He was a favourite author of mine, and I have (and have read) a number of his books including:

• The Normans in the South (1967)
• The Kingdom in the Sun (1970)
• A History of Venice: The Rise to Empire (1977)
• A History of Byzantium: The Early Centuries (1988); The Apogee (1991); The Decline & Fall (1995)
• A Short History of Byzantium (1997)
• Paradise of Cities: Venice in the Nineteenth Century (2003)
• The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (2006)
• The Popes: A History, (March 2011)
• Sicily: A Short History 2015
• Four Princes (2016)
• A History of France ( due to be released Oct 2018)

Remembering Étienne Gilson

From La Croix International:

There are certain intellectual figures, much celebrated in their time, whose subsequent disappearance from collective memory gives a sense of our changing society.

This is the case for Étienne Gilson (1884-1978), an eminent philosopher and historian of the Middle Ages, elected to the Collège de France in 1932 and to the Académie française in 1947. Today he is all but forgotten in French cultural history, along with much collective memory of Catholic history.

In his remarkable biography, Florian Michel, lecturer at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, discusses some of the political intricacies in Gilson’s thinking.

Jonathan Riley-Smith

It is with heavy heart that we relate the sad loss of noted Crusader and Knights Hospitaller historian and author, Jonathan Riley-Smith.  News came via the web - so more details will no doubt be forthcoming I am sure.

• Jonathan on Wikipedia
• Jonathan on Queen Mary University website

I have a number of his books in my own collection of crusades literature. A full list of his academic credits can be found on the above links.