Author:John Julius Norwich
Renowned historian, and author of A Short History of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich's classic history of Venice
A History of Venice tells the story of this most remarkable of cities from its founding in the fifth century, through its unrivalled status for over a thousand years as one of the world's busiest and most powerful city states, until its fall at the hands of Napoleon in 1797. Rich in fascinating historical detail, populated by extraordinary characters and packed with a wealth of incident and intrigue, this is a brilliant testament to a great city - and a great and gripping read.
'Norwich has loved and understood Venice as well as any other Englishman has ever done' Sunday Times
'Will become the standard English work of Venetian history' Financial Times
'The standard Venetian history in English' The Times
'Norwich has the gift of historical perspective, as well as clarity and wit. Few can tell a good story better than he' Spectator
John Julius Norwich was born in 1929. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and, after a spell of National Service in the Navy, at New College, Oxford, where he took a degree in French and Russian. In 1952 he joined the Foreign Service, where he remained for twelve years, serving at the embassies in Belgrade and Beirut. In 1964 he resigned from the service to write. He is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice and the Byzantine Empire. He has written and presented some thirty historical documentaries on television, and is a regular lecturer on Venice and numerous other subjects.
Norwich has loved and understood Venice as well as any other Englishman has ever done
—— Sunday TimesAs a historian Norwich knows what matters. As a writer he has a taste for beauty, a love of language and an enlivening wit. He contrives, as no English writer has done before, to sustain a continuous interest in that crowded history
—— Hugh Trevor-RoperThe standard Venetian history in English
—— Jan Morris , The TimesWill become the standard English work of Venetian history
—— Financial TimesHe is the nearest thing we have to a living legend, this side of Famous Seamus - one of the few people from our world whose name will still be known a century on
—— Irish TimesTim Robinson is the Proust of the western seaboard, a Ruskin of the isles
—— New StatesmanWill endure into the far future ... He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility
—— Colm Tóibín , Sunday Business Post (Books of the Year)An extraordinary monument
—— Irish IndependentAnyone willing to get lost in this book will be left with many indelible mental images of places they may never have visited but will now never forget
—— Dermot Bolger , Irish Mail on SundayCaptivating
—— IndependentBreathtaking ... the West of Ireland has found its ultimate laureate
—— Patricia Craig , TLS[An] encyclopaedic, ambitious and fluent history of Europe ... [like] a great game of chess, except that as well as black and white pieces there are green, blue, orange and purple ones all moving around a multidimensional board. Place names swirl, battles are won and lost, and the pieces are reordered ... Inevitably readers will be drawn to Simms's fascinating picture of the origins of the European Union ... thoughtful and stimulating
—— David Abulafia , StandpointA tour de force ... With phenomenal surefootedness, [Simms] picks out the patterns in what might otherwise appear a trackless waste of victories, defeats, treaties and coalitions, extracting from them provocative lessons for Europe's present and future. Big ideas animate the book ... This fascinating book deserves a wide readership. Even those who do not share Simms's fears and hopes for the European Union will be enthralled by the brilliance of his analysis and the dizzying breadth of his vision
—— Christopher Clark , Mail on SundayProdigious ... in its pages whole empires rise and fall ... Europe draws the reader forward with its grand epic of shifting alliances, clashing armies and ambitious statecraft. Mr. Simms ... is a skilled writer with a rare gift for compressed analysis. His focus on the military and diplomatic arc of European history lends his book a strong narrative line and thematic coherence
—— Jeffrey Collins , Wall Street JournalEuropean history comes in many guises, but Brendan Simms's strategic and geopolitical approach provides a strong and lucid framework within which everything else fits into place. His emphasis on the centrality of Germany offsets more western-orientated accounts while also giving due prominence to Eastern Europe. Covering the whole of the modern period, this book is more than an excellent introduction; it's a major interpretational achievement
—— Norman DaviesWorld history is German history, and German history is world history. This is the powerful case made by this gifted historian of Europe, whose expansive erudition revives the proud tradition of the history of geopolitics, and whose immanent moral sensibility reminds us that human choices made in Berlin (and London) today about the future of Europe might be decisive for the future of the world
—— Timothy Snyder (author of Bloodlands)A tremendous feat ... Simms's pages teem with some of the greatest characters in European history
—— Dominic Sandbrook , Sunday TimesRemarkably, such a large and complex book ... offers a very straightforward argument and thesis ... The more familiar the story, the more arresting is Simms's repositioning of it ... This isn't simply academic history but an account of how we came to be, albeit ambivalently and conflictedly, involved in a continental narrative that is still unfolding
—— Sunday Herald
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