You know those hacky history documentaries where there are lots of reenactments featuring actors in cheap costumes? Imagine if HBO decided to make one of those—so lots more gore and T&A—and then someone wrote the novelization of what results. That's what The Lion House read like. I'm not sure what Christopher de Bellaigue was aiming for with this "narrative nonfiction" take on the world of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnifcent: what was the point of this approach? It's too confusing, too lacking in a central thrust, too cavalier with the sources, to succeed as a work of history; too flat in its characterisation and too meandering in its POVs to work as something more novelistic. The prose is often clunky, trying and failing for pithy aphorisms (One section begins "Piracy isn't about sinking ships or winning battles. Piracy is burglary when the owner is out." Huh?) or edginess ("A fuck-off statement has come up over the Byzantine vaults on the northern side of the Hippodrome." That is just a weird way to describe a palace.) ( )

Interesting take on writing history. Tells parts of the stories of key monarchs and advisers in the era when the Ottomans were moving into southeast Europe in the 16th century.
The writing style is clearly not academic - with a very relaxed and informal presentation. This should make the content more accessible to the lay reader, but the author throws in a plethora of arcane terms for the titles of local nobility and military terminology. I spent more time in Google than I would have liked. My personal favourite was "maniple" for a small unit of soldiers. The dictionaries I checked indicate the term has not been used since ancient Roman times. Couldn't the author have used unit, troop, or some other term??
I learned about the life and times of Suleyman the Magnificent, but I could have enjoyed the journey more. ( )