Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise

There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as The Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere and attuned to the One God, whether that of Justinian or of Mehmet the Conqueror. 'Gong-tormented' and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in Mani, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 196

Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome

[Churchill] had been a man not only whose intimate links with history ran back to the last cavalry charge at Omdurman, in the year of the death of Gladstone - but whose lifespan connected the present with that of millions who had been contemporary with Palmerston and Peel and the Duke of Wellington, and even with hundreds of thousands still alive in his youth, who had lived in the time of Napoleon, Beethoven and George III. In Britain's last great crisis as an imperial world power, Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome, as a man who derived his majesty from a sense of imperial and military splendour of the past

Christopher Booker, in R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 490