The book culminates with how such a war might be fought, at sea, in the air and in both space and cyberspace. Coker has many interesting things to say about the role of ‘irrationality’ in conflict, whether based on honour or resentment, as well as on how culture influences and shapes strategic thinking.

His The Improbable War: China, the United States and the Logic of Great Power Conflict (Hurst) explodes the belief that greater economic co-dependency and common interests will prevent the US and China going to war in Asia-Pacific. Unusually for an international relations specialist, he has an enormous range of historical and literary knowledge, which he deploys to great effect. Dinshaw’s book is a fascinating read, though it still leaves us wondering what really made Runciman tick.Ĭhristopher Coker is one of this country’s leading thinkers about war, past, present and future.

Yet Runciman also wrote a string of major books on Byzantine history, most famously his three-volume History of the Crusades, and died at the age of 97 in 2000. Runciman loved anyone royal, adored travelling and, as soon as he could afford it, he resigned from his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge and lived the rest of his life enjoying travel, friendships and gossip. He was a friend of the literary scholar and theatre director Dadie Rylands and had Guy Burgess as his pupil. Steven Runciman was a historian of Byzantium, who was also a member of a louche social set in the Cambridge of the 1920s and was photographed by Cecil Beaton. My choice is Minoo Dinshaw’s biography, Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman (Allen Lane).

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