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“... and one wrote wistfully in his end-of-term report: ‘I wish this boy were kinder to me.’ Steven Runciman was already beginning to see history in a different perspective from his mentors. In those days one was taught that during the Dark Ages the Catholic Church civilised each wave of barbarians and preserved the link with the ancient world ...”

“... in the period between 1000 and 1135. Last in time, and also the shortest, is Mistra by Sir Steven Runciman: this treats the troubled history of the most important Byzantine city in the Peloponnese, and concentrates on the period from the 13th to the 15th centuries. One difference between the four is obvious: it is clear that Mistra is directed ...”

“... I met​ Steven Runciman several times towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince Consort, but he did it and our little turn round the room made me feel in some psychic way closer to the court of Queen Victoria ...”

“... its birth, or in the agencies by which it sought to establish it there. Much more recently, Sir Steven Runciman, the 96-year-old doyen of Crusading studies, has written that ‘the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God.’ The wickedness of Crusading and Crusaders had established itself as one of the pieties ...”

“... at Acre which probably inspired his famous constitutional experiments under Henry III. Sir Steven Runciman began his three-volume History of the Crusades, one of the truly great examples of English narrative historiography, with the implied question: do we regard the Crusades ‘as the most tremendous and romantic of Christian adventures or as the ...”

“... no awareness of the immense cultural superiority of the Byzantines to the Crusaders which Sir Steven Runciman has so clearly described, nor does he seem conscious that the last age of Byzantium, between the reconquest of Constantinople from the Franks in 1261 and its capture by the Turks in 1453, was in many respects an age of great cultural ...”

“... of Lords. Some of these landed aristocrats, led by life peers, are coming in useful after all. Steven Runciman once said that ‘the supreme duty of the historian is to ... record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.’ David Cannadine has done just that for the decline of the British landed ...”

“... all the characters of recorded history to one another, but the accounts had to be first-person. Steven Runciman has sent me this limerick: The stories I tell David Plante/Soon acquire a curious slant./His fertile invention/Twists all that I mention./I could tell him more,/But I shan’t. One afternoon, Henrietta Garnett came to visit me. She was ...”

“... new academic centres where the crusades could be rethought ‘on site’, as they began to be by Steven Runciman at the University of Istanbul in 1942-45, and, post-1948, by a growing cohort of Israeli scholars in circumstances that gave new and contested meanings to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. Now Christopher Tyerman offers ‘a new history’. He has ...”

“... Revel’s prediction of Kremlin-inspired interference in the open societies of the West. David Runciman argues that we are wrong to think that the 1930s or the 1970s provide any sure precedent for the current travails of democracy. It might be better, Runciman suggests, to look instead at the populist turmoil of the ...”

“... advances that would influence the course of social science around the world. In this milieu, W. G. Runciman was a seminal figure, who appeared as puzzling to the uninitiated as the discipline he studied. He was an internationally-known sociologist at a university that apparently had no department of sociology. It was rumoured that ...”

“... the coronavirus outbreak quite a few commentators compared Trump to the fictional mayor in Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s mayor refuses at first to accept that a shark is responsible for the fatal attacks – he claims the first was a boating accident. When the evidence becomes hard to refute he still declines to shut the resort. Only when another swimmer gets ...”

“... supported repeal. There were some who hated the idea, including William Gates Sr (father of Bill), Steven Rockefeller, George Soros and Warren Buffet. What is more, the Democratic Party was squarely against the proposal, and wanted to prevent it. Given that the alliance that had been formed to push repeal through was so obviously flaky, and vulnerable to the ...”