The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan review – history on a grand scale

From the lost Khazars of Turkey to the great sultans of Merv, a fearless and brilliant history of the world as seen from the east

Twenty five years ago, as a young journalist fresh out of college, I drove under wintry cloud banks, through the snow-haunted valleys of Annandale and Eskdale, to interview Sir Steven Runciman in his ancient tower-house in the Scottish borders.

Runciman was the greatest medieval historian of our times, but he was always a most undonnish don. Despite long spells in the dank of the archives, his life still reads like something out of an Indiana Jones film or even a Rider Haggard novel: he was besieged by Manchu warlords in the city of Tianjin, but escaped to play a piano duet with the emperor of China; lectured Ataturk on Byzantium and was made a grand orator of the Great Church of Constantinople; smoked a hookah with the grand celebi efendi of the whirling dervishes, and correctly predicted the deaths of both King George II of the Hellenes and Fuad, the last king of Egypt, by reading their tarot cards.

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