Minoo Dinshaw

Minoo Dinshaw lives in London and Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman is his first book. In Steven Runciman, Minoo Dinshaw has spotted one of the great untapped biographical subjects. In his enormously long life (from 1903 to 2000), Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. He was a man who attracted the strangest experiences, and his friendships, curiosities and plottings entangled him in a huge array of the twentieth century’s landmarks: artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny.