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The paper discusses an exhibition currently hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts and devoted to over one thousand years of Byzantine art, featuring the most important and wide-reaching collection of artifacts from the Byzantine period displayed in Britain over the last fifty years. The exhibition is revealing not merely because of the objects on display but also because of what it says in connection to our contemporary understanding of Europe itself. The study suggests that the exhibition is indicative of a shift in the images of East and West. This is not to say that we are witnessing an end to the intra-European divide between East and West, but rather that the current geopolitical context has accentuated the notion of a division between Europe and Islam. Thus, the public are inadvertently presented with the false yet dominant idea that Islam represented and still represents the end or at the very least a caesura of European culture. A deeper insight into history, however, reveals a very different picture, as the persistence and legacy of Byzantine art and religious life were more or less guaranteed under Ottoman rule. great britain [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the book "The Second Generation of Democratic Elites in Central and Eastern Europe," recommended for reading. The book brings thirteen papers addressing theoretical issues in the elite studies and discussing elite development in eight countries: Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The second generation of democratic elites is the elite of consolidation (by some called "post-transitional"). Their role has been not to struggle for the new rules of the game, but to employ them in the process of crafting democracy and a market economy. They were elected or nominated to their posts according to the new procedures. They had to face the challenges of more mature democratic politics and market mechanisms: electoral campaigns, class and value conflicts, unemployment, mass social protests, radical re-direction of international political and trade relations and many others. The charisma of communism fighters was gone, together with peoples' joy and their unequivocal support for reforms.