Rindis.com

The Ottoman Empire lasted a shade over six centuries, and Lord Kinross covers its history in a bit over 600 pages. 600 quite good pages, with a fair number of full-page images (mostly period portraits or landscapes) and a small number of maps. This is high-level history, so details are often sparse, but it does the job of outlining the course of the Ottoman state well.

This is not ‘a new history’, or… ‘new’ anything, even for when it came out in 1977. It is a long look at an admired subject, all told in one volume without going outside the confines of established historical study. It is instead a solid bedrock to lay the foundation for other works, such as The Ottoman Age of Exploration. If anything comes off a bit biased, it is probably British involvement in the 19th century; I can’t help but feel a little cynical about that, though I think he didn’t romanticize it all that heavily either.