Steven Runciman first saw the skyline of Istanbul, marching out of the mist from the gasworks at Yedikule to the minarets of Ayasofya, from the deck of his grandfather’s three-masted schooner, the Sunbeam (itself a historic yacht) in April 1924.

For a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, it was the only way to arrive. He never forgot the scene.

True, he missed meeting the last caliph (for they had inconsiderately deposed the sultan’s heir a few weeks before), but he complained rarely, and camels still swayed over the Galata Bridge, there were rather fashionable veils on the Grand’ Rue de Pera, and families such as the Whittalls flourished all over the place. Outside the then still unencumbered Theodosian Walls, a gypsy told him that he would have illnesses but would “survive to a ripe old age”.

The fortune-teller was right.