Southern Colonial.
Mostly post history, occasionally linguistics & literature.
Threads in Highlights.
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Author opens with the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, contends SA government very narrowly missed a violent overthrow, just as the Tsarist Russia barely dodged the abortive 1905 Revolution. 
Greek authors had acknowledged from earliest times there had been on their lands an earlier Civilisation than their own, which they had since taken over. But beyond their existence, nothing was known of these "Pelasgians" or "Trojans".
There are very few good sources on Anatolian between the Hittite civilisation's collapse & Persian conquest. 
Authors state urgency of their mission, having scant remaining time to describe Aboriginal social organisation & beliefs, already rapidly going extinct at the time of writing. Book mostly focuses on the Arunda (Arendte, spellings vary) still one of the most numerous groups today. 
Tasmania is a cool temperate, mountainous & windyswept island, roughly the size of a united Ireland.
A key point to understanding this book: 
Darius III (hence just Darius) won the throne of the world's largest yet-known Empire as a usurper, from fairly obscure origins. 
With a lack of any written records, the process of state formation in the Nigeria region remains murky. 
A key to understanding Gorbachev, ignored by both Western & Russian historiography: "He was the last true Leninist believer". 
Background up the the 18th Century. 
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.