It is immediately obvious from the first pages of this blisteringly superb book that a dominant undercurrent is the restrained exasperation of the teacher attempting to explain, to uncomprehending dolts, once again, that the earth moves around the Sun because of gravity. This is school teacher Sebag Montefiore at his absolute best. The story he tells is simple, yet complex. It needs, first & foremost, to be understood. To be understood, it needs to be explained. It has been written to de-sting the viper of ignorance. It could be angry, but is not. Instead it oozes authoritative restraint, lubricated by the sublime use of language. I cannot emphasise enough how the author is the master swordsman of the English tongue. It is not a dynastic narrative like ‘The Romanovs’, nor an historic travelogue like ‘Jerusalem’. It is, instead, a book written for recalcitrant learners by a still-patient teacher, restraining himself with the exasperated ‘have you not seen, have you not heard?’ of the prophet Isaiah. It’s telling us to ditch our preconceived certainties and embrace the complexity of a world that relishes too much its simplicities. The narrative sweep is of the recent history of the Middle East (1909-2026), a region that is both the crucible (‘Cauldron’ even) of the world and the repository of its most ancient bigotries. The reshaping of the region following the demise of the Ottoman Empire has seen not merely expressions of power, local, regional and international, but the resurgence of the hatred of Jews, the restatement of Islamist certainties, the emergence of many new powers and, crucially, a rejection of both the idea and the reality of Israel. It also saw, from the ashes of both Constantinople in 1919 and New Delhi in 1947 a series of new & competing nationalisms that have blistered themselves to ancient certainties and prejudices that, alongside external meddling, keep the region in turmoil. Yet it has also seen pragmatism as well as religious certainty, idiocy as well as genius. Is this a book about Israel? No, but overwhelmingly, Yes. Israel looms large in the whole. Although Sebag Montefiore’s story is focused on the broad sweep of leadership across the region’s 19 states the centrality of the Jewish question to the recent history of the region makes the book also the story of Israel, and its role in the creation of the region’s modern polity, rivalries and interests. Pleasingly, one can see how this is a book designed to demonstrate to the dunces in the class the fervency of the Dalrymple and the simplicities of the Lineker simply do not work. It’s not hard to see its origins in the futile exchanges on Twitter/X in the years since 7 Oct 2023. It will do nothing to change the minds of those cursed with the vilest of hatreds, the warriors of anti-semitism who, like Miller and Albanese, are the cavalry of the apocalypse, bloody swords aloft, calling civilisation to its doom, but perhaps it will do something to teach the rest of us that Israel, for example, is the product not of Zionism, but of the very hatreds that fuel the anti-Semitic narrative. Jews of the diaspora came back together for the first time in 2,000 years to secure precisely the protection and freedom that the world had refused to give them and wishes still to dismantle. It was fuelled by the forced exodus of Jews from their Babylonian exile across the Middle East, the product of the very exclusionary hatreds that diminished the countries that expelled them and helped create an Israel that was anchored not in the ghettos of Lvov, but in the Middle East. 1948 was an expression of self-determination, not of colonialism, an end to victimhood and a determination by the world’s most persecuted minority to take their destiny in their own hands, not to allow it to be subject any longer to the ridiculous hatreds of others. I cannot describe how beautifully this book is written. You’ll need to read it for yourselves to see what I mean.