Oltramar.livejournal.com Website Review

Stuff the silly stories about Lion-boy, Blondel is superb. The tune was re-used in the Carmina Burana and by Gautier de Coincy. Benedict is on the cover. I met Runciman briefly in his later years, when he lectured to the Scottish Hellenic Society in St Andrews: he was honorary President of the History Society at St Andrews, and bequeathed the university his library. I think he'd dialled down his campness for the occasion, unfortunately. His real failing as a historian was his preference for romance over accurate handling of publishers to go to.. Now they've done something Outremer-friendly! I picked up this gem in the university bookshop while sheltering from history of Outremer, with the original MS illustrations. So if you want to see all the usual suspects looking as if they've wandered in from the Wars of the Roses, this is where to go! The plates are gorgeous! And, being Taschen, it's affordable! As so often happens with an exhibition close by that you can visit any time you feel like it, I only finally caught this a few days before it closed. So, apologies to anyone who might have been inspired by a more timely review to sprint to the BM to see it for themselves! and certainly the prehistory and clas*ical section of the exhibition was wonderful - the Sicilians had lent some wonderful artefacts, and they were beautifully laid out and interpreted (with the as*istance of some glorious full-wall-sized photographs of Sicilys clas*ical sites landscapes, that you felt you could walk into). But the Norman section was just a bit of an anticlimax, because the bulk of the really stunning artefacts from that period cant travel. There were photographs of Roger IIs palace at Palermo, including a marvellous one of the ceiling of the Palatine Chapel, printed as a huge transparency and mounted on the ceiling, with benches so you could sit and gaze up at it; that was good, but its a poor look-out when the photographs are better than the original artefacts. And there was one crushing