"What academic writers forget is that everyone on Earth buys books for diversion, or entertainment," he says. The typical best-selling historian writes of Great Men or epic battles, but the 66-year-old Cahill has become a million seller by telling more thoughtful, and thought-provoking stories - the Irish preservation of ancient texts, how the Jews changed our sense of destiny, the egalitarianism of early Christianity, and now, the achievements of the Middle Ages. He is smiling, as he often does during a recent interview, relaxed and informal even when discussing the most serious topics. "But the advances we associate with the Renaissance - in the arts, sciences, education, scholarship, linguistics and even political experimentation - all got under way in the Middle Ages." "Of course, there was plenty of ignorance, as there is in every age," he says. He is discussing a time of visual beauty and literary genius, of breakthroughs for women and for individual freedom.
Historian Thomas Cahill is seated in the living room of his Upper West Side apartment - books and paintings on the walls, a concert piano behind him.
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