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. He has lived in Paris, Istanbul and Beirut and now lives in London. Career 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. Seven 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. It has been translated into Dutch, Italian, French and German and was published in the US in 2020 by UChicago. 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 1995 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. 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. 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. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), and the Royal Asiatic Society, and president of the Conseil Scientifique of the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles. Mansel was awarded the London Library Life in Literature prize in 2012. Over the past 30 years Mansel has contributed reviews and articles to a wide range of newspapers and journals, including History Today, The English Historical Review,