Muslims

Among the many colourful and captivating characters who people Elizabeth Drayson’s authoritative, fascinating account of 1,300 years of shared Islamic and European history is Abbas ibn Firnas, born around 810 in what is now southern Spain but was then the Muslim-ruled emirate of Cordoba. An innovative scientist who is remembered as the father of aeronautics and optics, he attempted an Icarus-like experiment in early flight which did not go well. Luckily, he survived to conduct important work on corrective reading glasses. The there is Adelard of Bath, born around 270 years later in the south-west English city. Also a scientist, he made long journeys throughout the Middle East and the

I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather than the wider public, the grand narrative history is something which general readers will applaud and enjoy. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, to give him the full honours, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldiers and is steeped in the history of the Middle East. There is no doubting the pivotal nature of the

On 25 July 1947, in the searing heat, almost 100 princes bedecked in jewels gathered in a circular room in New Delhi. Some of them ruled over principalities of less than a square mile; others over an area larger than Korea. All of them had been Britain’s close allies for more than a century and, now that the British were leaving India, many looked forward to regaining their states’ independence. But on that fateful day, as Lord Mountbatten swaggered around in his ivory white uniform, anxious murmurs rippled through the throng. A cousin of George VI, and related to virtually every royal in Europe, the viceroy was no republican; yet