It’s interesting looking at the spread of reviews about this book online. Most are positive – and mine will be too – but there are two significant subsets who loathe it. First, the extreme Turkophiles, for whom any history of the Ottomans that does not paint their empire as an unalloyed good and a general beacon of good governance, and secondly, the Armenian apologists, who lament Goodwin’s skating over the Armenian genocide. Of the two, the Armenians have the greater reason to be annoyed; the Turkophiles will never be satisfied.

For myself, I found it the most thoroughly enjoyable one-volume history of the Ottoman Empire that I have read, and I highly recommend it.