Outlandish Knight: the Byzantine life of Steven Runciman
MINOO DINSHAW

Born in 1903 and reading Latin and Greek by the age of five, the “pleasantly feline” Sir Steven Runciman, pioneering historian of the Crusades, lived his gilded youth and charmed life through nearly a century of disasters. His many travels took him to where history was unfolding in its most dramatic form, yet he had a knack for always landing on velvety paws. He first glimpsed Constantinople from the deck of the Runciman family yacht “Sunbeam” in 1924, on waters only recently vacated by tightly packed refugee ships. On holiday in China in 1925, the civil war detained him in the city of Tsientsin. After it fell to General Feng, he went blithely on his way to “divine, ducky, delicious Peking!”. Dysentery, picked up on a trip to India in 1939, left him unfit for combat. When he arrived in Istanbul for wartime duty as professor of Byzantine studies, a bomb went off in the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel where he was staying, but he was safely upstairs taking a nap. In Greece, where he went in 1945 as director of the British Council, the civil war was merely a distant rattle of gunfire. The only injury to boast of was a broken toe when Crown Prince Paul stepped on his foot. His final overseas jaunt, in 2000, a few months before his death, was a descent by helicopter on to the Holy Mountain. “The journey”, he remarked, “should surely be in the other direction.”