John Julius Norwich, the historian, travel writer, man of letters, and television performer known to Burke’s Peerage as 2nd Viscount Norwich and beloved by millions of readers, viewers, and listeners for his erudition, wit, and inerrant handling of historical narrative, died last week at 88 years of age. A patrician, Norwich specialized in the democratic art of elucidating the human past to the ordinary reader, as Gibbon, Hume, and Macaulay had done before him.
I never met Norwich, but it was through him that I first met the Norman knights of Sicily, the merchants and mariners of the Venetian republic, and the emperors and bishops of Byzantium. Later, he introduced me to the saints and sinners of the papacy, and the poets and painters of Victorian Venice too. 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.
