' An extraordinary book exceptionally fascinating always readable & penetratingly intelligent' David Abulafia' As rich funny & teemingly peopled as Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time Dinshaw writes with wit & elegance & the most elegiac passages of Outlandish Knight evoke a lost society London & way of life' Ben Judah Financial Times' This dazzling young writer is a mine of fascinating memorable & totally useless information I have been riveted by this book from start to finish & 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 & various man In his enormously long life Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades & Byzantium but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes Greek Astronomer Royal & Laird of Eigg His friendships curiosities & intrigues entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements civil wars Cold War betrayals & 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 & 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 & cherished would be destroyed