History > Middle Eastern

How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian write... read more

Jeremy Bowen has been the BBC's Middle East correspondent for twelve years and has been on the ground for them as the recent revolutions have swept through the region. Realising this as a game-changing moment in the history of the Middle East, Unfinished Revolutions captures the thoughts and feelings of the people involved a... read more

"Sandstorm" is the best kind of reportage: humane, historically-informed and full of details that only a writer close to the action could have noticed. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi has been one of the twenty-first century's defining moments: the Arab world's most bizarre dictator brought down by his own people with the ai... read more

After Zionism brings together some of the world's leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, and to explore possible forms of a one-state solution. Time is running out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent Jewish colonizati... read more

'Israel, six decades after its founding, remains a nation in thrall to an original martial impulse.' Born of idealism, under David Ben Gurion and his proteges, Dayan, Sharon and Peres, Israel came to prioritize security at all costs, and to seize land and water whenever opportunity arose. The security state erected around th... read more

Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enjoyment of family life. During her "Month By The Sea", Dervla develops an acute eye for the way in whi... read more

In a reappraisal of Iran's modern history, Ervand Abrahamian traces its traumatic journey across the twentieth century, through the discovery of oil, imperial interventions, the rule of the Pahlavis and, in 1979, revolution and the birth of the Islamic Republic. In the intervening years, the country has experienced a bitter w... read more

No two civilisations have spoken so many words about each other in recent years as those of Islam and the West. And no two seem to have communicated less. People Like Us confronts the themes that define this chasm head-on: women, jihad, secularism, terrorism, reformation and modernity. Its piercing examination of these subjec... read more

The ancient Egyptians' greatest monuments, ranging from Abu Simbel in the south to Cleopatra's palaces in Alexandria, were built over a period of three millennia, and yet a common architectural tradition links them all. Dieter Arnold here provides a single volume guide to one of the most remarkable architectures of the ancien... read more

This is the story of what happens when a liberal minded Prime Minister is caught between two sets of fundamentalists, one Islamic, the other Christian. It could be a tale of our time. But this is actually the story of Islam and the Empire on the Nile c. 1869. In the late 19th century, the river Nile became the setting for the... read more

This book brings the forgotten pages of history back to passionate life. Doreen Ingrams has sieved through secret cabinet documents, Foreign and War office memorandum and their cryptic annotations to observe the creation of a Zionist homeland out of the Palestine Protectorate. Cock-up or conspiracy? Judge Curzon, Churchill, W... read more

Jaffa - famed for its orange groves - was for centuries a city of traders, merchants, teachers and administrators, home to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. That is, until the founding of the state of Israel, which was simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews and a disaster - the Naqba - for the 100,000 Arabs who ... read more

In Fit to Print, which became a bestseller in Holland, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five years as a correspondent in the Middle East. Extremely young for a correspondent but fluent in Arabic, he spoke with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and agressors, and community leaders and fa... read more

After more than half a century of warfare and human suffering, a peace settlement in the Middle East appears to be as elusive as ever. Using pictures, text and graphics, Reuters journalists report from the front line of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and offer an insight into one of the world's most intractable conflicts. The... read more

This important new study shows how little the dynamics of the conflict between Jew and Palestinian have changed: how eerily reminiscent today's antagonisms and falsehoods are of yesteryweear; how 'modern ' leadership is anything but; and how much of today's self-righteous intransigence owes to what went before. "This is a br... read more

No Description

The volatile Middle East is a site of vast resources, profound passions, frequent crises, and long-standing conflicts, as well as a major source of international tensions and a key site of direct US intervention. Two of the most astute analysts of this part of the world are Noam Chomsky, the pre-eminent critic of US foreign p... read more

The news-breaking book that has sent schockwaves through the White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeada's evolution. Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and i... read more

No Description

For a reader unfamiliar with the history of Libya, Muammar Qaddafi might be mistaken for a character in fiction. His eccentric leadership as the nation's "Brother Leader", his repressive regime, sponsorship of terrorist violence, unique vision of the state, and relentless hold on power all seem implausibly extreme. This rivet... read more