A highly readable gallop through one of the world’s most complex political environments, The Cauldron is brilliant on narrative, weaker on analysis. Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself a formidable task: to compress the modern history of a region extending from Morocco to Iran, and from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the wars of 2026, into a single volume. The result is an exuberant pageant of sultans, shahs, kings, colonels, spies, revolutionaries and assassins. Few historians could move so confidently from the salons of Cairo to the palaces of Riyadh, from Atatürk’s Ankara to Khomeini’s Najaf, while keeping so many figures vividly in play.

Montefiore writes in a witty, engaging, conversational style. He relishes the pungent phrase and compromising anecdote: Churchill puffs his cigar in front of the pious Saudi king, saying that his rule in life ‘prescribes an absolutely sacred rite of smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after and during all meals’; ‘Hassan’, says the last shah of Iran of his Moroccan fellow monarch, ‘spends half his time asleep and the rest of it buried between the legs of the fairer sex.’ Even Roosevelt, more diplomatic than Churchill, refers to King Farouk of Egypt by the code name ‘fat fucker’. The advantage of Montefiore’s approach is that it restores both contingency and vitality to a history too often reduced to arid texts or ideological abstractions. Decisions are made by flawed, tired, frightened, ambitious or deluded individuals. Nasser is both political impresario and insecure control freak; the Shah is a modernising autocrat trapped inside his theatre of peacock opulence; Khomeini, an anachronistic cleric with mystical leanings, emerges as a revolutionary strategist comparable to Lenin. ‘To those who did not understand him,’ Montefiore writes, ‘Khomeini was a medieval fanatic. Actually, he was the future.’

The narrative is also impressively capacious. Montefiore refuses to treat the Middle East as an exclusively Arab or Muslim arena. Turks, Persians, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, Christians and the region’s diminishing mosaic of minorities all receive attention. He is particularly good on the mismatch between the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian inheritance of empire and the homogenising ambitions of the new nation-states. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Libya acquired ancient names but modern borders, often cutting across communities whose rulers treated one another as aliens or inferiors. The imposed state survived in some places; elsewhere it became the shell within which families, armies, parties, sects and intelligence services competed for possession.

Here the limits of Montefiore’s approach also become apparent. He invokes the medieval scholar Ibn Khaldun, but does not really employ his sociology of power: the recurrent passage from tribal solidarity or asabiyya to dynasty, luxury, decay and replacement. The book is full of ruling families but surprisingly thin on kinship as a political force. Cousin marriage, endogamy, clan obligation and patronage are not incidental survivals in the region; they help explain why supposedly modern institutions are so often captured by extended family systems and why ideological labels – Baathist, Islamist, socialist, nationalist – may overlay older solidarities. Sectarianism receives abundant narrative illustration, especially in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, but less sustained explanation. The reader sees the pieces moving without always being shown the structure of the board.

There are surprising omissions. Marshall Hodgson’s Venture of Islam (1974), indispensable for understanding the dynamics of power and culture in the arid lands of the region, is notably absent from the bibliography. E E Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of the Sanusiyya would have enriched the Libyan story; Elizabeth Monroe’s Philby of Arabia, the dynamics of the Saudi kingdom and its foundation. The Saudi grand mufti Ibn Baz’s fatwa legitimising the stationing of American forces during the Gulf crisis deserves a vital place in the genealogy of Osama bin Laden’s revolt. Kahanism and the American evangelical reinforcement of messianic Israeli nationalism deserve more attention than Montefiore provides, not least because US support for Israel has religious roots in Protestant eschatology along with sympathy for Jewish people. No survey can include everything, but these absences point in the same direction: the theatre of events and personalities obscures the social and religious mechanisms that connect them.

The problem is most acute in the chapters on Israel and Palestine. Montefiore is unsparing about occupation, settlement, Jewish supremacism and the ‘religious-fascist’ elements of the Israeli Right. His portrait of Israel as ‘swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy’ is both memorable and just. He also writes powerfully about Palestinian dispossession and humiliation, while refusing to romanticise Hamas or disguise the atrocity of 7 October 2023.

But his account of that day presents all 1,139 Israeli deaths as the work of the attackers without acknowledging credible evidence that some Israelis were killed by Israeli fire under versions of the Hannibal Procedure; the number remains uncertain, but the issue cannot simply be ignored. Nor is his treatment of Gaza wholly balanced. He repeatedly places ‘genocide’ in quotation marks or associates the charge with social media hysteria and radical academic fashion. Yet South Africa’s case remained before the International Court of Justice as this book went to press, and Avi Shlaim – an Israeli historian of international standing – has made the accusation the title and argument of a recent book. One may reject that judgement, but it cannot fairly be reduced to activist vocabulary. Montefiore’s tone here is more prosecutorial towards the protesters than analytical about the evidence.

He is on firmer ground when exposing the double standards of international attention. Gaza commands an exceptional place in the Western moral imagination, not least because of the prominence of some of Israel’s Jewish critics, while the catastrophes of Sudan, Yemen and Syria struggle to retain public notice. The Cauldron’s account of Sudan – a vast proxy battlefield in which regional powers such as the United Arab Emirates have helped to sustain mass killing – is especially valuable. And a closing analogy is salutary: terrible as the region’s modern wars have been, their combined toll of slaughter is far from being comparable to that of either front of the First World War and dwarfed by the European and Asian killing grounds of the Second. The point is not to establish a league table of suffering, but to resist the old Orientalist notion that the region is uniquely or innately violent.

Montefiore’s conclusion contains some of his boldest insights. The state system erected after the two world wars is weakening; local powers now exercise more agency than Western analysts habitually allow; and the Middle East is converging with the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia and East Africa as a theatre of rivalry and conflict. He is also persuasive in making 1979, rather than 1948 or 1967 alone, the hinge of the contemporary era. His formulation that ‘it was not so much Islam that was radicalised after 1979, but revolutionism that was Islamised’ is an argument that correctly echoes Olivier Roy rather than Gilles Kepel, and deserves fuller development than his narrative permits.

The Cauldron ends with Ibn Arabi’s poetic vision of a heart capacious enough to become ‘a meadow for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks’, a generous counterpoint to the book’s actual title. This vast and impressive work does not finally explain why the sword has so often decided who rules the region. It does, however, show with exceptional colour who wielded it, against whom and with what frequently unintended results. Readers seeking a grand explanatory theory will be left dissatisfied; readers wanting an immensely informed, humane and highly readable political chronicle will be rewarded in spades.