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,