The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization
Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow
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What did the ancient Greeks eat and drink? What role did migration play? Why was emperor Nero...
A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters of Antonio Gramsci (1908-1926)
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This edition of letters by Antonio Gramsci vividly evokes the 'great and terrible world' in which he...
An Education in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore
Flavia Arzeni, Howard Curtis and Gaganendranath Tagore
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In An Education in Happiness (Un'educazione alla felicita), Flavia Arzeni discusses that most...
Antony and Cleopatra
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The epic story of one of the most famous love affairs in history, by the bestselling author of...
Someone Else's Skin
7.7
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Winner of the Theakston's 2015 Crime Novel of the Year, and a 2014 Richard and Judy Book Club...
Notorious Prisons of the World
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The first prisons were in the dungeons of empires and castles, places of neglect and sheer oblivion....
Gwennie's Diary: A Kiwi's World Tour to Yorkshire 1939-40
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In 2003, a heavy parcel posted from New Zealand arrived at a bungalow in Rawmarsh, Near...
Borst: Ordering of Time (Paper)
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This book is a concise history of the use and interpretation of time, written by one of the foremost...
Elizabethan Espionage: Plotters and Spies in the Struggle Between Catholicism and the Crown
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In the wake of the 1588 destruction of the Spanish Armada, English Catholics launched an ingenious...
David McK (3562 KP) rated Angels and Demons in Books
Jul 4, 2021
And, like, I'm sure, many others, I actually read that sequel first, only later discovering it was such (although, admittedly, not a direct sequel) and going back to read the first on the series.
This is the one largely set in and around Rome, with a high-tech ticking time-bomb counting down in Vatican City as the Cardinals all meet to elect a new Pope following the death of the previous incumbent of that role. It also makes lots of the (supposed?) divide between religion and science, drawing on lots of conspiracy theories and bringing back into the realms of popular culture that old secret society, the illuminati.
I have no problem with any of that, and I do like a bit of derring-do, mystery and romance, but even I found it hard at times to swallow some of the outlandish scenarios and set pieces of this novel - I think, for me, the icing on the cake was the surviving-a-jump-out-of-a-helicopter-without-a-parachute bit towards the end!