This sloppiness with facts is compounded by other copyediting malfeasances. For example, three times in 30 pages Hughes repeats that St. Helena shipped back from Jerusalem “the stairs which Christ was believed to have climbed in the palace of Pontius Pilate.” And he often interrupts the narrative for tirades of dubious relevance to his ostensible subject. “Today Islam’s fundamentalist descendants can invent nothing, preserve nothing, create nothing. Comparing them with the remarkable figures of their own history is like comparing some illiterate IRA kneecapper to Seamus Heaney or William Butler Yeats.”
All of this is a shame since at his best, as in the chapters on the Renaissance and the 17th century, Hughes can be brilliant. Always on sure ground when discussing art and architecture, he offers vivid evocations of Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Caravaggio and their slightly less renowned contemporaries. Although he covers a lot of familiar ground and relies on well-known sources, he manages to make the material his own. Particularly his accounts of the construction of Rome’s aqueducts and the transfer of an Egyptian obelisk from the back to the front of St. Peter’s are masterpieces of muscular prose and telling details.
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