The very existence of the new series in which this book appears testifies to the renewed interest in the prolific eleventh-century Byzantine polymath. It brings together work initially carried out independently by Ioannis Polemis and Anthony Kaldellis, but bearing on the same individuals and therefore well suited to be published as a single book. The introduction contains a short biography of Psellos and an assessment of his relations with the successive patriarchs of Constantinople by Kaldellis, and an interpretation of the funeral orations by Polemis. There follow the texts, three letters, one to Michael Keroullarios and two to Ioannes Xiphilinos, and three funeral orations, for Keroullarios, Xiphilinos and Konstantinos Leichoudes. In addition to the general introduction, each text has its own introductory lemma, in a way that makes it possible to follow not only the direct, but also the indirect references made by Psellos, and to understand the often complex subtext which involves all the intricacies of court networking and strategic positioning. The two texts relating to Keroullarios are the longest and most complex, reflecting the author's ambivalent relationship with the patriarch himself, but also with his surviving family. One of the characteristics most commonly attributed to Psellos is a rather inflated ego, evident in all his writings and in the texts translated here. It is especially striking in the epitaphios for Xiphilinos, which has an entire section devoted to the author rather than the honorand. More generally, Psellos uses the funeral orations not only to pay homage to the deceased, but also to negotiate his own position at court, by means of sophisticated rhetorical arguments that he weaves into his texts. This fascinating personality is well known by several scholars, including the two translators, but is very little studied outside the circles of hard-core Byzantinists, largely because most of his 1,000 or so works remain untranslated. With the millennium of his birth coming up in 2018, this volume and the series that hosts it are very timely, making it at last possible for a wider audience to access from the inside the intricacies of being a Byzantine courtier.