" A complete and utter travesty. This book is little more than an epitome of J.J. Norwich's trilogy, which is quite bad. Brownworth writes well and tells a good story, but it's frequently a story very far from the historical reality. Given that he had the time to do some research between his podcast and the release of his book and it's disappointing to see that he did almost nothing. The picture of Byzantium represented here is very far from the ideas of modern scholarship, it's a crime to release such a volume on to the public. "
— Lucas, 2/7/2014