The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Dr Peter Frankopan’s book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, shows the importance of the east and the role it had in shaping modern Europe.

UK-based academics regularly feature in The Sunday Times bestseller lists and the shelves of booksellers like Waterstones, but the enormous market in China is harder to break. 

But Dr Frankopan’s book was translated into Chinese and it seems to have struck a chord with readers in the country.

‘For it to go to No 1 – and not only in Non-Fiction but across all genres - is slightly mind-boggling,’ he says. ‘I was in Beijing last week and at the airport looked up and saw a wall of my books staring back at me.’

read more here @ University of Oxford

read review here @ The Guardian

read interview here @ The Telegraph

visit website of Peter Frankopan

The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan

A book that sits proudly on my Crusades shelf in the Library, reviewed here by Andrew Holt, Ph.D:

I have long thought that Oxford historian Peter Frankopan’s The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012) is one of the more interesting and important recent books for understanding the circumstances leading up to the calling of the First Crusade in 1095. His emphasis on Byzantine efforts to win western Christian military support in their conflict with Muslim forces in the East provides an up to date and robust consideration of the issue that is lacking in many other works that consider the era of the First Crusade.  Frankopan’s work, particularly chapter six, gives a good sense of why western Christians believed this based on his analysis of extensive Byzantine efforts to cultivate and win such military support. 

read entire review here @ Andrew Holt's blog