This is not to mention Rubens, Rembrandt, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler. And he had so much to write about! In England we meet Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Bacon from France we have Montaigne, Corneille, and Descartes in Italy Bernini, Caravaggio, and Galileo and in Spain the entire Golden Age: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Velazquez, El Greco, and so many others. He simply had no taste for war he lacked that journalistic knack for making readers care about the winner of a race, even if we don’t know who’s running or what’s the prize.Īs usual, when Durant gets the political history out of the way and begins on cultural history, the quality improves markedly. Even the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest and most important struggles in European history, is somewhat lifeless in Durant’s hands. Yet when the camera zooms out from the personalities of individual rulers to the dynamics of armed conflicts, Durant falters. True, the portrait he paints of Elizabeth is vivid and engrossing and his coverage of Richelieu is nearly as strong. Very often I felt bored or confused during these sections, since it seemed as though Durant, no political animal, was rushing to get through them.

The political and military history are related at supersonic speed. Probably because of its genesis, this volume is less satisfying as a self-contained work than its predecessors. Then, for good measure, the Durants wrote two more. So, in his words, “one of the present authors, at an unseemly age, becomes a prima donna making a succession of farewell tours.” The projected single volume became three. But he soon realized that there was far too much information to compress. So continues my slow Odyssey through European history, with Durant as my leisurely guide.ĭurant originally planned a single, massive volume, to be entitled The Age of Reason, that would have taken the reader from the end of his volume on the Reformation (around 1560) all the way to the French Revolution.

The age of faith will durant