[Belfaborac]

I recently finished reading John Julius Norwich's wonderful work on Byzantium ("Byzantium: The Early Years", "Byzantium: The Apogee" and "Byzantium: The Decline and Fall"). Unlike so many scholarly works which are brimful of knowledge, but close to unreadable, "Byzantium" is an absolute joy to read and one of my 3 favourite works of its kind. The two others, by the way, are Shelby Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative" and "Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire" by Lord Kinross (Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross).

For those interested in the history of the areas in question, I simply cannot praise these works sufficiently.