The House Divided

Reviews / Votes

A masterly engagement with the most delicate and important of subjects - filled with gentle empathy, learning and rare balance -- Rory Stewart Brilliant -- Anita Anand * Empire * Rogerson is an original - eloquent and always fascinating -- William Dalrymple A balanced, sweeping, hugely ambitious work that delves into the long and tangled roots of the modern Middle East * Literary Review * This digestible history of the restless region is a useful alternative to academic tracts ... it has answers to several of the basic questions: the difference between Sunni and Shia, how Turkey and Iran aren't Arab, but are important anyway, and, sometimes, just how much Britain has to answer for in the Middle East ... this is not a book to be ignored -- Richard Spencer * The Times * Impressive ... a highly readable, lovingly researched, romantic and engaging history * Spectator * Not only an accessible account of Islam's schism, but a compelling introduction to the history of the Middle East * History Today * Entertaining, ambitious and thought-provoking... An ideal book for people who want to understand more about the Middle East * The Lady * This book is a tour de force. One of the best summary histories of Islam from its beginnings until today I have come across. Informative, engaging, and excitingly written, it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins and development of a great world religion -- Ghada Karmi, author * In Search of Fatima * A lucid, vivid and sweeping history of the divisions within Islam and their destructive impact on the contemporary Muslim world. Barnaby Rogerson takes you to the heart of the arguments and battles, revealing some stark truths. This is history as a living entity. A dazzling achievement -- Ziauddin Sardar, author * In Search of Mecca * Rogerson is a master storyteller, equally at home sketching the intimacies of the Prophet's household as he is illuminating geopolitical trends across the world of contemporary Islam -- Matthew Teller, author * Nine Quarters of Jerusalem * Rogerson knows that things are much more complex than Sunni versus Shia. But in its depiction of the multiple cats' cradles of tensions, The House Divided is jauntily readable and thought-provoking about a Middle East still in the middle of global crises, and still, as so often, misunderstood -- Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author * Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires * Praise for Barnaby Rogerson * : * Rogerson has a novelist's gift for filling out the characters of his main players -- Noel Malcolm Rogerson is an excellent story-teller -- Norman Stone Remarkable - Barnaby Rogerson has succeeded in isolating all the different strands of North African history -- John Julius Norwich Rogerson is eccentric and eclectic but always iconoclastic. He is not afraid to explore and elucidate the recondite in a way a more formal academic would not -- Ross Leckie