A World Lit Only By Fire

Fifty | Garden | Ninety | Twenty-Five

28 July 2022

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William Manchester has been a companion through his books for most of my adulthood. I read the first two volumes of his biography of Winston Churchill nearly two decades ago and was then disappointed to learn that he'd died before finishing the third. (The second ends with Churchill's election at the start of WWII). His biography of Douglas McArthur was complete and similarly good. As was the multigenerational story of the Krupp family. Unfortunately, A World Lit Only By Fire is mainly a wondering tale of western philosophy during the the medieval period focusing solely on what interested Manchester. And apparently he was really interested in the depravity of religious officials, while not at all interested in anything happening in eastern Europe. And then the last chapter is a short biography of Magellan, who was to be the subject of his next book a few years later. I'm not sure why he didn't just wait until then. Perhaps because, as he tells us in the introduction, he had a recent serious illness. Maybe he thought this would be his last book. Manchester himself was proud of it and Ryan Holiday, known for his musings on stoicism, thinks it's among his best. It's more a selection of what one man finds interesting about a period than his other histories I've read. Still it provides an interesting if incomplete window into the medieval period.