Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean

First edition, second impression.  x, 470pp.  Blue cloth-covered boards, gilt titles on spine.  8vo.  Volume is neat, clean, bright and tight throughout.  In its original dust wrapper, a little bumped on extreme edges. Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut challenge stereotypes.  There were cosmopolitan cities and centres of nationalism.  Using previously unpublished family papers, Philip Mansel describes their colourful, contradictory histories from the beginning of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century to their decline in the mid-twentieth century: Smyrna was burnt; Alexandria Egyptianised and Beirut lacerated by civil war.