In 2010, Philip Mansel published Levant, a wide-ranging history of three Mediterranean cities: Alexandria, Beirut and Izmir. In that book, he identified common factors that made these cities distinctly Levantine, in particular diverse ethnicities and cultures, wide trade links and loose Ottoman control. He might have added Aleppo to the trio.

If he had written about Aleppo six years ago, he might have mentioned a spirit of optimism. Great efforts had been made to restore some of the fabric of the old city: the German non-governmental organisation GTZ, the architect Adli Qudsi, the Friends of Aleppo Citadel and many others were seeing to that. Experts from the Royal Academy had been trawling the city for potential loans for a Syria exhibition due to open in London in 2013. Many old houses were being restored – the shoe designer Christian Louboutin had bought one and the musician Julien Weiss was already installed in another – and some old municipal buildings were being turned into large hotels.

The key to the success of this book is Mansel’s detailed knowledge of the city and the sources that bring a real flavour of the centuries, going back to the early Ottoman period when a wide variety of nations maintained consulates in the city, and international merchant houses traded goods in one of the Middle East’s largest bazaars with miles of covered streets.

That doyen of writers on the Levant and mixed cities of the Middle East, Philip Mansel, has therefore written a timely book charting Aleppo’s history from the Ottoman era through to the present day, backed up by a second half of the book that is a collection of historic travel writings across four centuries by 15 noted visitors to the city, such as Jean Louis Burckhardt, Gertrude Bell and Leonard Woolley.

Remarkably, there seems to be so much more written in the past about Aleppo than in the modern era. Mansel’s book is one of the few devoted to it in English.

Even in Syria, under Hafez Al Assad, Syria’s second city was somewhat relegated to the background and woefully ignored, but in this century underwent a degree of a rebirth before its present reduction to near ruin. Many of the old houses had opened as hotels, and with the support of the Agha Khan Foundation and the German government parts of the Old City had been carefully and beautifully restored, albeit for a short-lived revival.

The focus of the book is unhesitatingly about the people of Aleppo, their lives, their trade and beliefs, and in no small part the city's rich links to the outside world. It is not a paean to the city's great architectural and cultural monuments, and this makes it a more lively, even more relevant, work.

This is an eloquently written book that at times reads like an elegy to Aleppo’s bazaars, embracing worldview and cultural diversity. Written by a scholar who is not only profoundly knowledgeable but who also sincerely cares about his subject, it is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about what we have lost.

Mansel invites his readers to consider a striking question: if a place as rich and diverse as this can be so quickly destroyed by fanaticism, could the cities in which they live be more vulnerable than they think? History does not progress in linear fashion; sometimes it draws circles or slides backwards. Those seeking to understand how this can happen — and it can happen anywhere — will find in Mansel’s book a powerful combination of research, knowledge, conscience and heart.