Reviews for Short Constitutional History of England

The average rating for Short Constitutional History of England based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-13 00:00:00 Norma Fugate If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end. Sebald was talking about flying over densely settled areas, but to read the compressed chronicle of a thousand year empire is also to view our species from a great height, and the experience offers just as frightening a vantage. From the heights of historical survey, from the distance of many centuries, the professed, the “higher” motivations and justifications barely reach our ears. “Christendom” as a united bloc of believers seems a fantasy; or a joke, an easy irony; as “democracy” will one day be; and all we can see are the compulsive collisions of states; the borders receding, the borders advancing; the cities built by some, and torn down by others; the usurpers and regicides ascending supposedly sacred thrones (each Byzantine emperor was acclaimed “equal to the Apostles”); the political entities in their periods of strength exploiting and devouring, in their periods of weakness exploited and devoured by others; the universal wolf. (Sir Philip Sidney said a great conqueror is but the momentary “cock of this world’s dunghill.”) Just as we fly over cities knowing that human beings are guiding those toy cars and emitting that industrial smoke, so also do we scan each war-filled page knowing that thousands of people, way, way down there – slightly clouded over by “battle was joined” or “the looting lasted three days” – are being raped and robbed and murdered; or are raping and robbing and murdering. And that last ditch narrative, of “Decadence,” is story we Band-Aid over our confusion, a story that does not clarify our situation – does not point a direction or describe a momentum. Norwich’s remark that the pivotal catastrophe of Byzantium - defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071 - occurred three centuries before the Emperor became a vassal of a different Turkic state, the Ottomans (by which time the Seljuk order had been shattered in its turn by Tamburlaine’s Mongols), and four centuries before the Empire finally, cinematically “fell” (Constantine XI, last emperor and namesake of the millennium-distant founder, when he saw the Turks had breached Constantinople's land walls cast off his purple robes and led a last desperate charge, his body never to be identified or recovered*), made me pull down my copy of Richard Gilman’s Decadence: The Strange Life of a Epithet, in which I saw that I had once underlined this: One begins to suspect that whatever “decadence” may be it plays a scapegoat role as a word, an ascription. And it serves, it seems, to cover up our ignorance of, or refusal to see, how the world operates in one of its deepest dimensions independently of what we call cause and effect…History is not a chronicle of discrete events or epochs, nor is it to be understood in categorical ways. Everything connects. The reason “decadence” will not do as a description of Rome is that it does injustice to both her past and her future; she did not wind down, she did not disappear, nor did she bring down upon herself her own fate. Fate was there, and fate is another word for change. ----- * He was long thought to slumber in a cave, awaiting the hour when he would reconquer Constantinople/Istanbul for Christianity. What is it with Eastern Orthodoxy and agelessly slumbering heroes? The 18th century Russian field marshal and scourge of the Ottomans Aleksandr Suvuorov was also believed to sleep deeply within a mountain, to awake in the Motherland's hour of greatest peril. This belief was so durable and widespread that during WWII Red Army soldiers were propagandistically conflated with Suvorov's shade:

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-20 00:00:00 John Ray This is history the way you always wished it could be but never is. It is a scarcely-believable catalogue of violent deaths (try being pierced at close range by hundreds of arrows until you bleed slowly to death), sexual intrigues (one Empress had specially-trained geese to peck corn from her nether regions), and religious oddities (men who live their whole lives on top of a column, for instance). With barbarian hordes, crusading knights, treasures and quests, the whole thing is like Tolkien got together with David Lynch to invent something that you could never get away with if it were fiction. There are times, especially near the beginning and end, where you can tell that this has been abridged from the three-volume edition (which doesn't seem to be easily available any more). But on the whole it's a very enjoyable and fascinating canter through a period of history which is still not well known, and which is the link from the classical world to the mediaeval world. Great fun.