Thomas Cahill, popular history writer, dead at 82

NEW YORK (AP) — Thomas Cahill, a scholar of ancient languages and belief systems with a knack for popular storytelling who engaged history readers with such bestsellers as “How the Irish Saved Civilization” and “Desire of the Everlasting Hills,” has died at age 82. Travis Loller, a family friend and Associated Press writer, says that Cahill died in his sleep Oct. 18. He began publishing in the early 1970s, but he gained a wide audience in the mid-1990s with “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” in which he cited Ireland’s crucial — and unappreciated — preservation of classical texts after the fall of the Roman Empire. He wrote a series of narratives he called the “Hinges of History.”