The Silk Roads: A New History of the World - Tapa dura

Brilliant and fearlessly wide-ranging . undaunted by the complexity of the material, and the scale of the subject he has taken on, Frankopan marches briskly through the centuries, disguising his erudition with an enviable lightness of touch, enlivening his narrative with a beautifully constructed web of anecdotes and insights, backed up by an impressively wide-ranging scholarly apparatus of footnotes drawing on works in multiple languages . This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare . a remarkable book on many levels, a proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievement (William Dalrymple, Books of the Year Guardian)

Breathtaking and addictively readable - History Book of the Year (Daily Telegraph)

Many books have been written which claim to be "A New History of the World". This one fully deserves the title.It is difficult, in a short review, to do justice to a book so ambitious, so detailed and so fascinating as this one (Gerald DeGroot The Times)

The author's gift for vividness is reminiscent of Jan Morris, while his command of revealing facts or fancies is not far short of Gibbon's (Felipe Fernández Armesto Literary Review)

A book that roves as widely as the geography it describes, encompassing worlds as far removed as those of Herodotus and Saddam Hussein, Hammurabi and Hitler.It is a tribute to Frankopan's scholarship and mastery of sources in multiple languages that he is as sure-footed on the ancient world as he is on the medieval and modern (Justin Marozzi The Sunday Times)

Splendid ... tightly researched ... invigorating and profound [with] enough storytelling to excite the reader and enough fresh scholarship to satisfy the intellect...charismatic and essential (Dr Bettany Hughes Daily Telegraph)

The Silk Roads, which covers several continents and many centuries, is based on astonishingly wide and deep reading and in all areas draws on the latest research...it is full of vivid and recondite details (Independent)

This is, to put it mildly, an ambitious book...Frankopan writes with clarity and memorable detail (Economist)

Timely . it deserves a place by the library fireplace (Country Life)

Dazzlingly good ... [Frankopan blends] deep scholarly skill with a real literary talent (Dan Jones Evening Standard)

Peter Frankopan is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and Director the Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University. He took a First in History and was Schiff Scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, before completing his doctorate at Oxford, where he was Senior Scholar at Corpus Christi College. He has lectured at leading universities all over the world, including Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, NYU, King's College London and the Institute of Historical Research. His revised translation of The Alexiad by Anna Komnene was published in 2009 and The First Crusade was published in 2012.