In the company of queens

Steven Runciman, the historian of Byzantium, is a puzzling figure. He was an outrageous snob, once remarking that he would have enjoyed being the widower of a Spanish duchess, which would have made him a dowager duke in Castile. He particularly relished the company of queens (of the female variety), and he took the Queen Mother out to lunch once a year at the Athenaeum. But as Minoo Dinshaw shows in this richly original life, the snobbery was a subtle pose. Runciman was a tease who liked to play games with people, and he made a career out of being enigmatic.

His family were wealthy shipbuilders in Northumberland. His parents were both dedicated public servants — his father was a minister in the last Liberal governments. Young Steven threw off the fading, dull, Liberal world of his parents very early on. At prep school his best friend was Puffin Asquith, whom he addressed as ‘dovey, sweety, lovebird’. At Eton he was cleverer than his masters.

He won a scholarship to Trinity, Cambridge where he became obsessed with the pink-faced, pink-shirted Dadie Rylands, a callous narcissist. This was the closest he ever came to falling in love. Steven cut his auburn hair in a fringe, befriended Cecil Beaton and wore rouge; but he was a teetotaller with none of the self-destructiveness of the Bright Young People. His frantic attempts to wreck the marriage of his brother Leslie to Rosamond Lehmann —who not only was the most beautiful woman in Cambridge but mortified the exhibitionist Steven by writing an acclaimed bestseller, Dusty Answer — revealed him as thin-skinned, jealous and insecure.

Runciman stayed on at Cambridge, where he became the only pupil of the dry-as-dust Byzantine historian J.B. Bury. He was a reluctant don, and he resigned his Trinity fellowship, aged 34, when he inherited enough money to live off his private income.