STEVEN RUNCIMAN:
Born in Northumberland, he was the second son of Walter and Hilda Runciman.[1] His parents were members of the Liberal Party and the first married couple to sit simultaneously in Parliament.[2] His father was created Viscount Runciman of Doxford in 1937. His paternal grandfather, Walter Runciman, 1st Baron Runciman, was a shipping magnate.[2] He was named after his maternal grandfather, James Cochran Stevenson, the MP for South Shields.
Eton and Cambridge:
It is said that he was reading Latin and Greek by the age of five. In the course of his long life he would master an astonishing number of languages, so that, for example, when writing about the Middle East, he relied not only on accounts in Latin and Greek and the Western vernaculars, but consulted Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian sources as well.[3][4] A King's Scholar at Eton College, he was an exact contemporary and close friend of George Orwell.[2][1] While there, they both studied French under Aldous Huxley.
In 1921 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a history scholar and studied under J. B. Bury, becoming, as Runciman later said, falsely, "his first, and only, student".[2] At first the reclusive Bury tried to brush him off; then, when Runciman mentioned that he could read Russian, Bury gave him a stack of Bulgarian articles to edit, and so their relationship began. His work on the Byzantine Empire earned him a fellowship at Trinity in 1927.[1]
Work as a historian:
After receiving a large inheritance from his grandfather, Runciman resigned his fellowship in 1938 and began travelling widely. Thus, for much of his life he was an independent scholar, living on private means.[2] He went on to be a press attaché at the British Legation in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in 1940 and at the British Embassy in Cairo in 1941. From 1942 to 1945 he was Professor of Byzantine Art and History[2] at Istanbul University, in Turkey, where he began the research on the Crusades which would lead to his best known work, the History of the Crusades (three volumes appearing in 1951, 1952 and 1954). From 1945 to 1947 he was a representative in Athens of the British Council.[1][2]
Most of Runciman's historical works deal with Byzantium and her medieval neighbours between Sicily and Syria; one exception is The White Rajahs, published in 1960, which tells the story of Sarawak, an independent state founded on the northern coast of Borneo in 1841 by James Brooke, and ruled by the Brooke family for more than a century.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, one of the leading historians of the Crusades,[5] denounced Runciman for his perspective on the Crusades.[6] Riley-Smith had been told by Runciman during an on-camera interview that he [Runciman] considered himself "not a historian, but a writer of literature."[7]
According to Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusade sat Hertford College, Oxford,[8] Runciman created a work that "across the Anglophone world continues as a base reference for popular attitudes, evident in print, film, television and on the internet."[9]
Steven Runciman delivered a lecture in the University of the Punjab Lahore (Pakistan) on Monday, Feb 24, 1964 at 11.00 A. M in the University of Senate Hall. The topic was "Personal Contacts between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages". Professor Hamid Ahmad Khan VC Presided the lecture. Allama Muhammad Yousuf Gabriel attended this lecture and gave a letter to Sir S. Runciman to deliver it to Sir Bertrand Russell. Sir Steven delivered this letter to Bertrand Russell and he sent a reply to Allama Muhammad Yousuf Gabriel but address was not Pakistan but India. The letter was returned from India to Pakistan and was handed over to Yousuf Gabriel. Sir Bertrand Russell wrote: "Since Adam and Eve ate the apple man has never abstained any folly whatever he could do and the end is atomic hell".