Having read all of David Stuttard's history books, I think, and long-since having awarded five stars, it's difficult to know where to go next with my enthusiasm, but this might be his best book yet.
While as ever, the text is thoroughly annotated with a wealth of references for the academic reader, the author indulges unwashed imaginations like mine with the kind of grace notes that give great histories their essential character. Copious end-notes attest to the author's care in reconciling his sources, but it's in his descriptive verve that Stuttard reveals his enduring passion for the subject.
Small details hold out rich rewards. I'd once thought that Napoleon had coined a phrase when he diminished the English, calling them a nation of shopkeepers, though Adam Smith beat him to it (The Wealth of Nations, 1776). I haven't been able to verify a notion that it first arose in Montesquieu's fictitious correspondence between Persian diplomats in Europe half a century before (Persian Letters, 1721). It turns out it was nothing new even then, according to Samira Ahmed's 'Art of Persia' (BBC, 2021); she says that antique Persians grateful for their Great King's prudent economic systems dubbed him 'Darius the shopkeeper' - a compliment, but perhaps back-handed? In Phoenix, Stuttard notes the epithet directed at Europe as a taint levelled by Persians against the Greeks. A minor detail in the context of the Persian Wars maybe, but an entertaining thought.
The narrative of this book is never less than tautly tuned, in a style that the author tested to its limit, I thought, in his 'History of Ancient Greece in Fifty Lives' (Thames & Hudson, 2014). There, space was at a premium, whereas here, urgency gives way to relish, with beautiful scenes conjured through montages of succinct images, whether it be decisions agreed on a bristle of hands, diplomacy amid the whisper of translators, or sustained descriptions of battle that draw on its machinery and technique, vivid, frank, and percussive.
I'd hesitate to call Stuttard's style 'dramatic', though he occasionally calls on appropriate dramatists to comment, even at the finale of the book. In truth, he doesn't imagine exchanges of dialogue between his real-life protagonists, though he dissects their thinking with great precision. Instead I would call it 'cinematic', and maybe never more so than in the opening passages, a pulse-racing Mediterranean pre-title chase sequence worthy of a Bond movie.
This elegantly-presented book has taken me on a journey entirely out of keeping with our circumstances in pandemic, and what a tonic it has been.
Bravo.
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David Thompson
'The slap of sails, the rap of ropes', and names 'that would resonate through history forever'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2021