by Peter Mansfield, Nicolas Pelham
Peter Mansfield (born Ranchi, India, 2 September 1928; died Warwick, England, 9 March 1996)[1] was a British political journalist. He was educated at Winchester College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was elected President of the Cambridge Union.
He resigned from the British Foreign Service over the Suez affair in 1956. He worked in Beirut, editing the Middle East Forum and wrote regularly for the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, the Indian Express and other newspapers. From 1961 to 1967 he was the Middle East correspondent of the Sunday Times.
His books as author or editor include Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia Who's Who of the Arab World, Nasser's Egypt, Nasser: A Biography, The British in Egypt, Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf and The Arabs, and A History of the Middle East.
His History of the Middle East was updated after his death by Nicolas Pelham in 2013 into a fourth edition A subsequent fifth addition was published in 2019.
Mansfield's obituary in The Times praised him as "eloquent, scholarly, free from convention...[He] earned himself a distinguished place by forty years of thoughtful work and the passion of his convictions."
One of the most crucial, volatile, and complex regions of the modern world, the Middle East has long confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. This now-classic book, and still the essential work on the subject, follows the historic struggles of the Middle East from Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria, through the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the history of Islam and its recent resurgence.
For this fourth edition, Economist correspondent Nicolas Pelham contributes an extensive new section examining recent developments throughout the Middle East, including the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the situation in Iran, the region’s relations with the United States under President Obama, the Arab Spring, and more.
