From reading Alf Henriksson's "Byzantinsk Historia", I gather that one problem with writing a history of Eastern Rome is that they wrote about war and politics and lots and lots about christian doctrine but precious little on other subjects, so we know all we care to know about various christian sects and which emperor assassinated which, but not much about art, science or daily life.
Being emperor wasn't something you did for your health, by the way. The book ends by saying that only 34 out of 107 emperors died of natural causes.
One thing I really miss in 2049 is the soundtrack by Vangelis. The one in 2049 sounds like a primitive AI trying to sound like him, sometimes just alternating between two chords for what feels like forever.
Vangelis elevates the movie from a notably pretty noir to a metaphysical epic. For my money it is the most extraordinary and moving soundtrack of all time.
I assume a lot of it is for small businesses, but I'm actually always a bit surprised at the sheer volume of bank branches in prime downtown real estate.
I think the only time I've gone in a bank/brokerage branch in years is when I've needed something notarized or I've had some non-standard brokerage transaction I've needed to handle in person.
Ski resort, IIRC. Was in one of the Bond movies (with snow). Probably others. Looks scarier than it is (at least relative to other scary airstrips in worse place - a few high in the Himalayas come to mind).
Edit - hmmm, looks like I'm thinking of another mountain top airport in the French mountains.
The Bond one is Courchevel (with runway designation 22, not 09) and a bit bigger from what this image looks like. Source: I've taken a stupid video there: https://redd.it/v7vkx6 :-)
I read the first few novels. They are told in a matter-of-fact style, nothing very spectacular happens and Maigret is anything but charismatic. It sounds dry but the realism is very refreshing and must have been even more so at the time.
I'm reading them just now - I find detective novels and sports papers to be good ways to learn languages, since there's some common structure to the stories. Also, the kindle store has a _very_ limited selection of foreign language texts[1], but they do have the complete Maigret, in 6-novel volumes, so you can get em cheap. (Others I've been reading are Vargas, Leblanc, Montalbán - Paco Ignacio Taibo II is next on the list)
Another striking thing about Maigret is how much he relies on the police force around him. Today we expect the detective to be a loose cannon, at odds with the department, but Maigret is constantly asking others to surveil and report, the spider in the web. There's only a couple of early stories with hints of a difference - where he notices something odd and ends up following someone on instinct. (Le Pendu de Saint Pholien, La Guinguette a deux sous)
Also - mentioned in the article - but there's a lot of boats! Simenon wrote quite a few of these early novels on board boats and it shows, trawlers and narrowboats abound.
[1] 10 years ago I was able to buy novels on amazon.fr while in France, but this stopped working? It wanted a delivery address and credit card in the country as well. I was cycling round the country back then and ended up buying paperbacks at flea markets instead.
> Another striking thing about Maigret is how much he relies on the police force around him.
That's because he is a "commissaire", a superintendant, for most of the books.
Maigret is in a lot of way the reverse of a hard boiled detective. He is if not happy at least content in his career as a civil servant and bureaucrat. He is perfectly adept at navigating his hierarchy and knowns his place. Maigret serves a system he respects and values, fully aware of his prejudices which he sees a necessary wall between the honest people and the miscreants. He is very much upper middle class, what the French would call petit bourgeois, a happily married catholic who likes order and long meals.
The article rightfully points that these novels have a reactionary surface but try to find a redeeming feature in how they describe society in its totality. I would be less generous.
I read quite a few in my early teens, and it did evoke an image of Paris back in the day. So much, that at first it was a bit inconsistent, confusing, until it turned out that I was reading them in random order, and some were decades apart. One detail that has stuck was the presence of a stove in Maigret's office: in some books, he pokes the thing continuously (or so I remember), in others there's central heating. Because the books set in all seasons, many of them don't even mention heating, which makes it even more mystifying.
Panic's (which can be captured) are captured and will be propagated to the supervisors. That's one of the biggest goals of building this, panics in tasks which have been spawned is a nightmare to deal with
Being emperor wasn't something you did for your health, by the way. The book ends by saying that only 34 out of 107 emperors died of natural causes.