William Burke-Larkin

William Burke-Larkin was born in Cork and lives in the west of Ireland, where he has spent much of his working life reading the history of the early modern Mediterranean. A lifelong student of Venetian history, he first encountered the career of Francesco Morosini through the archival literature of the Cretan War and found himself unable to abandon a figure of such contradictions: a man of baroque cultural sophistication who destroyed the Parthenon and called it a fortunate shot, a constitutional official who stretched his republic's institutions to breaking point, and a naval commander who died in the capital of his conquered kingdom rather than in the palazzo his office required. A Fortunate Shot is his most ambitious work to date and one of several books he has written on the military and political history of the early modern Mediterranean world.