Yep, I'm annoying - particularly so because I'm right. =)

A machine for serving food would be good, however.

I like Gore Vidal's historical novels -- 'Julian' set during the Roman empire, 'Creation' about 500 years earlier in Persia and China. He's also written about six books covering American history from 1770 to 1950 -- Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Washington DC, Hollywood, Empire.

She also likes Colleen McCullough's early novels in the <Masters of Rome> series.

Yes, that one is actually true, as it were. You make it necessary with that compulsive contrariness of yours. I gave up a similar habit when I was 18, yanno. :p

<The rules are that a certain Ilyumzhinov has come up with this cheese once, and we must of course comply painful. As well as various absurd clauses on doping in chess, the chess world ruler, who understands well with aliens spread once. Does all this really be so different and we can not?>

Robert Graves -- I, Claudius -- is the classic of the ancient genre. A couple of pretty good recent ones are thrillers by Robert Harris -- Pompeii, and Imperium, the first part of a trilogy about the Roman orator Cicero. >

thanks! always appreciate good leads. Will check out Vidal. Read both of Robert Graves' claudius ones and they were very good - unique.

The best 'historic' fiction I've read recently is Neal Stephenson's 'Baroque Cycle', first published as 3 books of about 1000 pages each (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) ... set in England, France, Egypt, Japan, Mexico, etc in the period 1650-1715, with fictional characters mixing with historical ones (Isaac Newton, Louis XIV, Leibniz, Hooke, William of Orange, and many more).

The ones I normally read are diehard historicals...think Colleen McCullough's 'First Man in Rome', and Gary Jennings' 'The Journeyer'.

I do know that one of them (more recent history though) was - one of the few I've read that actually deals with Hungarian history, of the 16th century - its English title is <Eclipse of the Crescent Moon>. Here's an example at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Cresc.... The translation is quite good, although it tends to err on the side of literalness, and so can sound a bit flat and stilted in places. But that's possibly more noticeable to me, since I know how much better it "sounds" in the original. ;)

umberto eco taught me that translations tended not to work well unless the author was so famous that he/she had a following of other authors that could perform the translation with the same 'heart' - good example for this would be Tolstoy.

But, Annie, it seems from the reviews you may have found a rare exception to the rule! So i have snatched up one of the 12 used copies available in english that you linked to me.

It's very strange, in my experience, for a writer to keep improving like this. Many hit an early peak and can't quite get back to it, while others just repeat the same themes and ideas.

I read Quicksilver - a sort of 17th century prequel to Cryptonomicon, with related characters - a few months after it came out, couldn't believe how good it was, and managed to get a preview copy of the 2nd part. Then I had to wait 6 months for the final segment ... and they're each 1000 pages long. Amazing.

Since then he's written another long novel, Anathem, also extremely good.

In the historicals I have always gone after the authors that put so much time into their books that they are able to conquer a serious amount of scope in 700-1400 pages and it usually takes them 3-4 yrs per book. Its amazing to me to see what is essentially a well researched 'hypothesis' into how things were, with so much attention to detail. More often than not they contain more info than their non-fiction brothers, but just written better.

Now to find a bit of that with a bit of this, a la Graves, now that is something!