Of the many cities that dot this ancient coastline, Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch are among the oldest and most intriguing. All are beautifully situated, and for layers of history and cultural riches they are rivalled only by their sister cities of Rome, Istanbul and Jerusalem. Yet their fates have been remarkably different. Once major power centres, all five have declined into relative obscurity. Nevertheless, their entwined history takes in Alexander the Great, Nebuchadnezzar, Archimedes and the Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman conquests, and their greatness still lingers for those who seek it out.

To bring these mysterious lost capitals to life, historian Katherine Pangonis sets out on a voyage from the dawn of civilisation on the Lebanese coast to a modern-day Turkey wracked by the devastation of the 2023 earthquake. Combining on the ground research with spellbinding storytelling skills, here is a revelatory new story of the Mediterranean, and a powerful reflection on the sometimes fleeting glory of empires.

Queen Sibylla was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader States of Outremer. Yet for all the many books written about the Crusades, one aspect is conspicuously absent: the stories of women. Queens and princesses tend to be presented as passive transmitters of land and royal blood. In reality, women ruled, conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled, and undertook architectural projects. Sibylla’s grandmother Queen Melisende was the first queen to seize real political agency in Jerusalem and rule in her own right. She outmanoeuvred both her husband and son to seize real power in her kingdom, and was a force to be reckoned with in the politics of the medieval Middle East. The lives of her Armenian mother, her three sisters, and their daughters and granddaughters were no less intriguing.

The lives of this trailblazing dynasty of royal women, and the crusading Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, are the focus of Katherine Pangonis’s debut book. In QUEENS OF JERUSALEM she explores the role women played in the governing of the Middle East during periods of intense instability, and how they persevered to rule and seize greater power for themselves when the opportunity presented itself.

Queen Sibylla was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader States of Outremer. Yet for all the many books written about the Crusades, one aspect is conspicuously absent: the stories of women. Queens and princesses tend to be presented as passive transmitters of land and royal blood. In reality, women ruled, conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled, and undertook architectural projects. Sibylla’s grandmother Queen Melisende was the first queen to seize real political agency in Jerusalem and rule in her own right. She outmanoeuvred both her husband and son to seize real power in her kingdom, and was a force to be reckoned with in the politics of the medieval Middle East. The lives of her Armenian mother, her three sisters, and their daughters and granddaughters were no less intriguing.

The lives of this trailblazing dynasty of royal women, and the crusading Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, are the focus of Katherine Pangonis’s debut book. In QUEENS OF JERUSALEM she explores the role women played in the governing of the Middle East during periods of intense instability, and how they persevered to rule and seize greater power for themselves when the opportunity presented itself.

‘As rich, funny and teemingly peopled as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time … Dinshaw writes with wit and elegance, and the most elegiac passages of Outlandish Knight evoke a lost society London and way of life’ Ben Judah, Financial Times

‘This dazzling young writer is a mine of fascinating, memorable and totally useless information… I have been riveted by this book from start to finish, and leave the reader with one word of advice. Watch Minoo Dinshaw. He will go far’ John Julius Norwich, Sunday Telegraph

The biography of one of the greatest British historians – but also of a uniquely strange and various man

In his enormously long life, Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. His friendships, curiosities and intrigues entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was as happy living in a remote part of the Inner Hebrides as in the heart of Istanbul. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny.

Outlandish Knight is a dazzling debut by a writer who has prodigious gifts, but who also has had the ability to spot one of the great biographical subjects. This is an extremely funny book about a man who attracted the strangest experiences, but also a very serious one. It is about the rigours of a life spent in the distant past, but also about the turbulent world of the twentieth century, where so much that Runciman studied and cherished would be destroyed.

‘There was magic about. Saladin himself was troubled by terrible dreams…’

Steven Runciman’s unrivalled history of the Crusades is a classic of learning and vivid, compelling storytelling, which brilliantly brings to life the personalities, battles, massacres, triumphs and follies of these epochal events. In this second volume of his trilogy Runciman tells the story of the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the disastrous, bloody Second Crusade and the inexorable rise of the crusaders’ nemesis, Saladin.

‘The pre-eminent historian of the Byzantine Empire and of the Crusades … a surefooted guide who could render the past visible and familiar’ Daily Telegraph

‘He tells his story plain … always pleasurable to read’ Gore Vidal