Philip Mansel

In 2016, Mansel's book Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria's Great Merchant City was released. The book features the author's history of the city in Part 1, as well as 15 primary source accounts in Part 2, collected from British and French consuls, merchants, scientists, and travelers to Aleppo over the past 400 years. A revised and updated paperback edition was published in 2018.

Mansel has lectured all over the world – including the United States, France, Germany, Italy and Turkey – and has made a number of appearances on radio and television, including in the two-part Channel 4 documentary Harem and in Versailles (BBC2, 2012). He has been interviewed on French, Belgian, Turkish and Lebanese television.

Mansel was awarded the London Library Life in Literature prize in 2012.

In 1995, Mansel was a co-founder of the Society for Court Studies, together with David Starkey, Robert Oresko and Simon Thurley. For 20 years he was the editor of the Society's journal, The Court Historian.

In 1995 Mansel started a campaign to save Clavell Tower, a ruined folly of 1831 which threatened to fall over the cliff above Kimmeridge Bay. This led, in 2007-8, to the Tower's deconstruction, relocation, reconstruction, restoration and modernisation by the Landmark Trust. Clavell Tower is now the Trust's most popular property.

Philip Mansel's first book, Louis XVIII, was published in 1981 and this – together with subsequent works such as Paris Between Empires 1814–1852 (2001) – established him as an authority on the French monarchy, a fact recognised later by his appointment as Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Six of his books have been translated into French. In 2019 his book King of World: The life of Louis XIV, was published in London by Penguin. Further editions are planned in the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Philip Mansel (born 1951) is a historian of courts and cities, and the author of a number of books about the history of France and the Ottoman Empire. He was born in London in 1951 and educated at Eton College, Balliol College, Oxford, and obtained a doctorate at University College London in 1978.

Sultans in Splendour, with over 100 photographs on monarchs of the Middle East before 1945 was published in 1988, Constantinople: City of the World's Desire 1453–1924 in 1996 and Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, about the history of Smyrna, Beirut and Alexandria, was published in 2010. The last two have been translated into Italian, Greek and Turkish.