Jerusalem: The Biography

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian and popular narrative writer, and this Weidenfeld and Nicolson book is a sweeping single volume history of Jerusalem from antiquity to the present, tracing the city through its successive religious and political custodians. Its strength is genuine narrative scope, few single volumes attempt to cover the full multi millennial history of the city across Jewish, Christian, Muslim and secular periods in one continuous account, and Montefiore draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to do it. Its limit is that as popular narrative history aimed at a broad general readership rather than a specialist monograph, it moves quickly across contested and heavily debated episodes, so a claim about one specific disputed event in the city's history is better checked against a focused academic study of that particular period.