Malise Ruthven at Literary Review:
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.’
more here.
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