The disaster at Manzikert was preceded by decades of aristocratic Greek infighting & administrative drift, but most crucially the de-facto disbanding (to become tax farmers) of the Byzantine reservist core - the "Themes".
Namely his explanation for Byzantium's sudden & incredibly steep decline. Over a mere century it went from Basil II's tightly-run & unified realm, ringed by either vassals or cringing & defeated enemies, to one on the verge of collapse, riddled by corruption & political anarchy. 
Indonesia remains near-invisible globally as a country that's just competent enough to have stable government & avoid wars, but far too poor to project power/culture abroad. However, as E. Asian birthrates collapse & demand labour, this will change. 
Stove's commendation of Jaynes' theory of religion tracing its origins to auditory hallucinations, combining both immediacy & delusiveness. Unlike nearly all other senses, hearing is "peculiarly mandatory". Well, there's also smell.. but let's not go there. 
The reviewer D. Stove, was a tenured Philosophy professor at Sydney uni. He was often characterised as a Logical Positivist, a label he rejected, mainly due to his own deep pessimism on mankind's ability to think rationally. We'll see this informs his own fascination with Jaynes. 
Preliminaries. In the aftermath of the collapse of Communism, each state's underworld earned reputations for unique aptitudes in varying criminal specialties. For Bulgaria & Albania it was car-theft. Yugoslavia it was arms & cigarettes. Ukraine & Moldova, human trafficking. Etc. 
Nordic successes of the early 20th Century were & are virtually invisible to a casual reader of the news cycle. 
This chapter is presented both as a sequel & comparison to Toynbee's "The Abortive Far-Western Christian Civilisation". For a time, Ireland culturally bloomed under its own independent Church, which even proselytised in direct competition against an infant Roman Catholicism. 
The late Persian Empire had hired ever-growing numbers of Greek mercs, mainly to supress internal revolts. Although the degree to which the Persians were dependent on them is now thought to be exaggerated, the total in Persian service was nonetheless enormous by Alexander's time. 
Quoted book is top-left... yes I'm a Nabokov completist, he's written so many greater books than Lolita. I've blanked-out any plot SPOILER text in images for anyone who hasn't read Dostoevsky's novels already, unless explicitly marked. 
Finished this early January. The most striking thing about Gobineau is his extreme, even religious level of pessimism & resignation. This despite he lived during an era of among the most rapid & transformative of technological advancements in all history.
Starting off, I'm exploiting the current tunnel-chatter trend to excerpt from ch.7, on Jewish migrants. 
@Paracelsus1092 They lived without toilets or indoor plumbing, street-shitting, usually washed into the local stream, which was their sole water supply. Town was mostly unemployed and the main food-source was welfare, with the inhabitants constantly hungry. All children were thin & malnourished. 
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