Many of the luminaries whose biographies appear in this collection are much revered as pioneers in the field, and their books are cited and, no doubt, read from time to time to refresh fading memories. The works of Guy Le Strange, however, are my constant companions on any intellectual journey through the pre-modern Islamic Middle East. Palestine under the Moslems, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate and Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, to name only three, are all books I like to keep close at hand so that I can reach out and consult them without leaving my desk and interrupting such concentration as I have. Yet, Guy Le Strange never attained a permanent academic position and was never a Fellow of the British (or any other) Academy; in fact, to use an old-fashioned term, he was a gentleman scholar.

His family could trace their origins back to the Norman conquest and the first member of the family firmly attested in historical record was a John Lestrange who died during the reign of Henry II, before 1178. By the thirteenth century they had acquired the property known as ‘The Old Hall’ at Hunstanton on the north coast of Norfolk. The family were to own the property for over seven centuries. They were a classic example of the English gentry, never being awarded a title of nobility nor, except for a brief period in the seventeenth century, playing any part in national politics. You could have described them as a perfect example of the dehqan (landowner) class of the English county where they always lived. The surname was spelt in a number of different ways throughout the centuries, but by Guy's time it was generally spelt Le Strange, the form he always used.

Guy was born at Hunstanton on 24 July 1854. His father was a decorative church painter of only modest distinction, and his work can still be seen on the ceiling of the great East Anglian cathedral at Ely. His mother Jamesina Stewart was Scottish and came from Balladrum in Inverness-shire. His father died in 1862 at the age of forty-seven, when Guy was only eight years old. He was educated at Clifton School in Bristol and, perhaps improbably given his later career, in the agricultural college at Cirencester. He never attended any university on a formal basis nor took any degree.