The Best History Books 2017

From ancient Greece to the Second World War, from the papacy to the Antichrist, from Byzantium to China and the story of the Jewish people, historians select their favourite books of the past year.

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Averil Cameron
My choice is Minoo Dinshaw’s biography, Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman (Allen Lane). Steven Runciman was a historian of Byzantium, who was also a member of a louche social set in the Cambridge of the 1920s and was photographed by Cecil Beaton. He was a friend of the literary scholar and theatre director Dadie Rylands and had Guy Burgess as his pupil.

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