RaveThe Independent (UK)An astonishingly ambitious book ... His organising idea is a powerful one. The Middle East is a “cauldron” because geography has made it a crossroads and prize for empires, migrants, settlers and competing peoples ... Montefiore is also a gifted miniature portraitist. His leaders tend to arrive with an epithet, a physical detail, a weakness or an absurdity ... Yet the same narrative method contributes to the book’s breathlessness. Montefiore advances at such speed that an assassination may be followed by a coup, a marriage, an invasion and a new ideology within a few pages. The vividness of each episode can paradoxically make the wider argument harder to follow ... None of this invalidates The Cauldron. Quite the reverse. Its scholarship, range and vitality make it an impressive achievement.
