RIP …

… A People’s Historian: John Julius Norwich, 1929-2018. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Writers learn by reading other writers, and reading Norwich is a masterclass. Spring-heeled in his Gibbonian rhythms, alert for aesthetic and narrative treasure glinting by the side of political and military highways, magisterial in his sweep and subtle in his corrections of earlier historians, and never without a touch of Augustan irony, Norwich was a serious writer. He was also a modest one.