Byzantium. The Empire of the New Rome.

Phoenix, London, 1994. IX,334p. Paperback. Small personal library mark and name on free endpaper. There are two key themes which Prof. Mango has been developing for some time. (...) The Byzantines were first and foremost orthodox Christians. It might be thought that this world provide an excellent foundation for a national identity, but it was cut across by local loyalties. (...) The other key theme is that Byzantium remained in all aspects of its culture anchored in late antiquity 9...) and 'for a thousand years Byzantium made a virtue of arrested development' (Lewis Mumford). A great strenght of this book is to make clear that change was almost impossible, because these basic principles lay at the centre of a network of ideas, which provided logically consistent explanations of a vast range of phenomena, natural and supernatural, historical and eschatological.' (MICHAEL ANGOLD in The Classical Review (New Series), 1981, p.279-80). From the library of the late Sir Kenneth James Dover.