I didn’t expect to get pulled into Byzantine history at breakfast, but Jonathan Harris’s prose is crisp, almost cinematic. Fascinating! This intro reads like the beginning of a novel — yet it’s grounded in splendid scholarship. Posting the page that got me hooked.
It surprised me how quickly the tone pulled me under. Here's why.
Harris opens the door to Byzantium not with the musty air of textbook reverence, but with the clean cut of a storyteller who knows where the shadows fall.
In just a page, he renders ancient political paranoia eerily familiar — as if history moves in silk robes through dimly lit corridors. It’s an elegant reminder that history, when well-written, resists distance.
It’s a tone that I hope to channel in writing my own monograph on Korean art history; clear-eyed, shadow-aware, and never far from the human drama — woven from the vicissitudes and agony of entangled histories, not least in the Korean past, where art emerges as both witness and survivor
