Jason Goodwin
The Last Roman City
Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453
By Roger Crowley
Faber & Faber 320pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Sir Steven Runciman’s lapidary account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, now forty years old, was a lamentation for the civilisation and the people he loved: ‘In this story,’ he wrote, ‘the Greek people is the tragic hero.’ Roger Crowley’s Constantinople reminds us of the triumph, too. For the Ottomans, the city was a challenge to which they rose, fulfilling a Mahometan prophecy which had grown old in the telling. It was a wild venture for the new young sultan Mehmet, who staked his reputation – and his life – on its success.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings