Conan the Barbarian (Thanks to Wikipedia) With the financial crisis back on the agenda I decided I had better get planning for a worldwide economic meltdown.  There won’t be much call for development chemists in any financial armageddon so I’ll be needing an alternative career path.  I have decided to become a barbarian.  Steel is

The Way We Live now isn’t the best known of Trollope’s works nowadays.  His novels about politicking churchmen are a lot more familiar.  But in his own day he was as well known for being one of the few novelists who really understood money.  And this one is the one that is really worth reading

Constantine died in Nicomedia in 337 after a short illness.  He had lived to 64, a good age for the time. The death of Constantine ended one of the longest reigns in the history of the empire.  His death came just after he had celebrated his thirtieth year as emperor, something only Augustus had previously

If it weren’t for Constantine it is quite likely that very few of us would have ever been inside a Christian Church.  The city he founded bore his name up until the lifetime of my Grandfather.  It is still the largest one in Europe.   Ten more emperors were to bear the name Constantine, and when

With the defeat of  Licinius, Constantine was left as the sole leader of the entire Roman world.  But that didn’t stop him from dreaming.  In one dream he saw the spirit of the city of Byzantium as a tired and frail old matron.  But then she was transformed before his eyes into a beautiful young

Why does anyone get this into their head to do this?  At some point Emile Zola decided that it would be a good idea to write a huge series of novels based around the interlinked tales of one family. The whole series would take him over twenty years and finish up comprising twenty separate full