Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw. Penguin, 767 pp, £30.00, September 2016, ISBN 978 0 241 00493 7
This is a book that will interest the general public as well as Byzantinists. It has a particular resonance for me, because I met Sir Steven briefly when he visited Western Australia in 1960, and at one or two conferences after that, and when I sent him a copy of my first Byzantine book he wrote a very pleasant complimentary letter to me.
For a description of the book, see Penguin’s advertisement and a review in the London Review of Books; also a partial preview (which will make clear the excellent writing style of the author) at Google Books.
The book documents the extraordinary life of someone who made Byzantine history much more ‘popular’ than it had been in the past.
John Melville-Jones