Reviews for Uk Investment and Business Guide

The average rating for Uk Investment and Business Guide based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-04 00:00:00 Parwinder Klair An account of the reigns of fourteen emperors by a guy who lived through them all, which tells you a lot about the absolute state of the Byzantine empire around 1100 AD. Also, they might have found things easier if they hadn't all been called either Michael or Constantine, just saying. This is a beautifully written/translated work--Psellus was a polymath, a rhetorician as well as philosopher, doctor, engineer, military expert, etc. Includes quite a lot about how extremely clever he is and how various emperors hung on his every word, looked on him as a god, suffered when they failed to take his advice, etc. Very interesting and acute in places, grovelly in others--the account of Michael VII, written in that useless berk's lifetime, presents him as some kind of new Alexander. Very much focused on court shenanigans and politics rather than what was going on in the wider empire or the life of the common people, who should, on Psellus' account, be robustly ignored at all times.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-07 00:00:00 Adam Jasons A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine emperors. Emperor, relative of emperor, or high government official were all high-risk professions in that era, with penalties for failure besides death or exile including blinding, castration, or forced conversion into a monk or nun (although a few managed to wriggle out of the latter disempowerment, sometimes.) A lively, colorful, and occasionally bizarre narrative, at once very approachable and sometimes very alien. Reading between the lines, as well as what's on them, is recommended. I would have been quite at sea if I hadn't watched a rather good Great Course on the Byzantine Empire a month or so ago ( ); as it was I was lost in a smaller swamp. This is a text that, for the non-scholar, could really have used about double its own weight in explanatory footnotes, but I'll have to look at other books for that. As it stood, it was that goldmine for the researching writer, a first-hand account, studded with the kind of telling details that general histories leave out. For my purposes, well worth it. The fact that I could for a pittance pull this man's direct voice, as it were, out of the air (and onto my Kindle) across barriers of time and space and language a millennium after he lived is a source of wonder to me. Given that he was apparently a notable scholar of his time, as well as times, it's bemusing to imagine how it would have seemed to him, could he have been told about it. Ta, L.