题目内容
Lord Norwich's first test, he notes in his introduction to The Middle Sea, was to compensate for an ignorance of Spain. He records that he was fortuitously invited to dinner by "my dear friend" the Spanish ambassador to London and "a few weeks later there came an invitation for nay wife and me to spend ten days in Spain. " It is hard to believe that was all the effort he made, for he acquits himself well, even in the convoluted diplomacy that ended in the war of the Spanish succession.
Lord Norwich's second task was to strike a balance over time. The Middle Sea reaches from ancient Egypt to the first world war. Like many long, chronological narratives, it becomes progressively more detailed, though it is debatable whether this is a good thing. Few people have changed the region as much as the Romans, yet their republic's five centuries get only a page more than the great siege of Gibraltar which began in 1779.
Lord Norwich's final, and arguably most important, challenge is the area that is most likely to engage modern readers: the intermittent, but frequently savage, conflict between Muslims and Christians. Impatient with the notion, echoed most recently and disastrously by Pope Benedict, that the Koran sanctions the spreading of Islam by the sword, Lord Norwich is no Islamophobe. He is hostile to the Crusades and fulsome in his praise of that traditional Western schoolbook villain, Saladi.
Yet his account remains disappointingly focused from Christendom outwards. It is true that Muslims do appear in his book—usually in battle—but they rarely speak. Only two items in the 170-volume bibliography are by Arab scholars and only one is by a Turk. This is unabashedly history of the old school: Eurocentric (Octavian, the author declares without irony, was the "undisputed master of the known world") and largely uninterested in what other economic, social and technological changes may have shaped events.
What fires Lord Norwich is recounting the doings of princes and preachers, warriors, courtiers and courtesans. And he does it with consummate skill. He spices his nan-ative liberally with entertaining anecdotes, deft portraits and brisk judgments. Aristotle, for example, is given short shrift as "one of the most reactionary. intellectuals that ever lived". Lord Norwich's control of his vast and complex subject matter is masterly. And the subject matter itself is as colourful as history can get. No sooner have readers bidden farewell to a short, fat, dissolute sultan, Selim the Sot, than they encounter the "piratical Uskoks, a heterogeneous, but exceedingly troublesome community". Although few will resist the temptation to keep turning the pages, readers will close this monumental work exhilarated and informed, but with plenty of questions still unanswered.
According to the author, Lord Norwich's new book on Mediterranean history is
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SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. At the end of each news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions.
听力原文： An English couple has been allowed to divorce because the wife moved the furniture every day for 38 years of marriage, press reports said on Tuesday.
Pauline Turner, 62, rearranged the tables, chairs and sofas for every one of the 13,872 days of her marriage to John, also 62, the court at Middlesbrough in Cleveland heard.
The couple moved from the matrimonial home, a three bedroom semi-detached house in Thornaby-on-Tees in Cleveland, into a caravan six miles away with some of the furniture fixed to the floor, in the hope the obsession would cease.
Mrs. Turner did not change, however.
"It's unreasonable to move furniture every solitary day. I was sick and tired of life with Pauline," said John Turner, who moved out this year.
Pauline Turner, who still lives in the caravan, with its own neat garden, initially contested the divorce, but accepted in court on Monday that the marriage had irretrievably broken down.
"Moving furniture about was just something I did, always have done and I always will do. I suppose everybody has their little obsession, whatever," she said.
Judge Peter Bowers granted a "cross decree", meaning both parties won a divorce after hearing that John Turner, who makes bird tables for a hobby, had committed adultery since January.
Which of the following is not the reason for the English couple's divorce？
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