Professor C.E. Bosworth FBA is a Middle East historian of world stature. In this volume his friends and colleagues come together to honour his 70th birthday. This book ranges widely over time and space but its core is the Islamic culture of Iran and Turkey. The contributors cover topics from the Arab conquest in the seventh century to Turkish and Iranian nationalism in the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to medieval Turco-Persian history, an area which lies at the heart of Professor Bosworth's oeuvre: more than half of the articles fall into this category. Moreover, five of them focus on that early medieval eastern Iranian world on which he has written so widely. While the emphasis lies squarely on history, other fields such as religion, literature, music, art and numismatics are also represented. Thus the volume offers a conspectus of the cultural contribution of Iran and Turkey to Islamic civilisation.