Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West. After more than 20 years as an editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters, he is now a researcher at the Global Terrorism Research Centre and a PhD candidate in sociology of religion at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He lives in Washington DC.

He has a BA with Honours in Russian and History from Wesleyan university and was a Fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute of Soviet Studies. He also studied at the Pushkin Institute of Russian language in Moscow.

'A wonderful and important book which for the first time presents the Western debt to medieval Arabic learning in a clear, accessible manner. From the azimuth to the zenith, from algebra to the zero, so much of what the West takes for granted came to us from the Arab world . . . A fascinating book'

'Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace'

'In this clear and well-written book, Jonathan Lyons delves into all sorts of musty corners to show how Arabic science percolated into the Latin world in the middle ages and helped civilise a rude society'

'Sophisticated and thoughtful ... Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant'

The fascinating story of how an English scholar brought Arab learning to the West and rescued it from the Dark Ages