A chatty and charming wade through centuries of allusion, beef, violent feuds, and disingenuous historicising. Not dry in the slightest, even when it gets tough going. (Two individual potshots are taken at Thomas Hobbes on the same page at one point). Very rarely do I read nonfiction beasts like this (I should more often, really) but I really enjoyed myself, even if it took about two weeks for me to read it all. Palmer is a Florentine specialist and it does show, but I think it's effective in the sense that she can use Florence as a microcosm for everything else that was going off, and she justifies her especial interest in it well. The fifteen snapshots of various Renaissance lives were incredibly effective, too. I can't really claim I'm going to remember everything that was in here, my UK state school education -> uni English degree pipeline too patchy to have hit Cicero or the Church Wars with much depth, and sometimes I wonder if Palmer assumes rather more knowledge than the average popular historical reader might have, but I think enough of it has gone in. Certainly the point has.

And I also think reading this in the middle of reading Terra Ignota (two books down and two to go) has given me some really good new ways of looking at what Palmer is doing with this series and why she makes her decisions the way she does; wherefore Mycroft Canner's hat, for instance? (I actually don't agree with some claims that this reads all that similarly to Terra Ignota though. Yes it's clearly the same writer and has some of the same quirks, but Palmer imbibes Mycroft with so much more hysterical and unstable pomposity lol)

Stylish and compelling, I really enjoyed this a lot; it's just that I often feel with novellas I just want MORE of them, and I especially felt this here because I was so interested by it. Smart and atmospheric and really lush. I know there are more novellas and I might have to get them bc what do you mean this is just a novella. This could've been a big brick novel I'd have chomped it up. I love high stakes court mess and I love rigid social structures that people have to navigate around. Pleased I finally picked this up, think I'll try some more of Vo; it's a shame the vast majority of her stuff is an absolute nightmare to source in the UK.

'On Friday the seventh of August there wasn't a breath of wind and it was horribly hot...'

It feels somehow uncouth to give the Moomins a star rating but here are 5, though none of them are a comet. There's a reason they, like Peanuts, have persisted, beyond just being cute designs. (Side note Charlie Mackesay wants Jannson's nachos so fucking badly.) But Jannson pulls from the end of war anxieties so poignantly and channels them into a children's story which still perfectly frames and freezes the nuclear and existentialist fears of the end of WWII. It's done in a way which remains digestible, it's a children's book after all, but still thoughtful. It's a shame it still feels relevant in that way...

Also I love the Hemulens.