![]() ![]() ‘A powerful telling of an extraordinary story, presented with a clarity and a confidence that most academic historians would envy.’ ‘Moving and convincing…Crowley gets you by the throat, switching back and forth between the Ottoman and the Byzantine camps as he leads his story to a nail-biting close.’ ‘A vivid and readable account of the siege…(And) an excellent traveller’s guide to how and why Istanbul became a Muslim city.’ ‘Crowley’s fascinating account of the years leading up to and the final sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire reads more like lively fiction than dry recounting of historical events.’ ![]() ‘If all history were written like this, John Grisham would be destitute.’ ‘Crowley manages to invest his retelling with almost nail-biting drama.’ ‘In this account of the 1453 siege, written in crackling prose by former Istanbul resident Roger Crowley – his first book and not, I hope, his last – we are treated to narrative history at its most enthralling.’ ‘Engagingly fresh and vivid…The twenty-one-year-old Mehmet (the Ottoman Sultan) emerges from this book as ruthless but innovative, irascible but versatile and, above all, indefatigable – a worthy successor to Alexander and the Roman emperors he admired as much as any Muslim hero.’ ‘One of the most exciting, cliff-hanging stories in world history, and in Roger Crowley’s book it is told extremely well’ ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |