Book Review - Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

 Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

London: Phoenix, 2012 (first published 2011)      ISBN 9781780220253

One of the blurbs on my edition of this book calls it "a tour de force", and there is no doubt that Jerusalem lives up to that particular piece of praise as well as all the others that it has gained since publication. It is the story of Jerusalem for sure, but along the way the reader learns much of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of the Arabs, Romans, Ottomans, Russians and British, of Crusader Kingdoms and Sultanates, and of modern geopolitics.

Like all great works of non-fiction, Montefiore has woven much more into his story than the bare bones. The reader comes away from this work with a much broader knowledge of Western and Middle Eastern history than they would have a right to, given the books ostensible subject matter. The reader does of course gain an intimate knowledge of the development and trials of Jerusalem itself, as well as wonderful little titbits of other information such as the origin of the phrase "Bob's your uncle", the fact that Rudolf Hoess, Franz von Papen and Rudolf Hess were all in Jerusalem at the same time, and that the future King George V got tattooed when there, in the same place as his father.

These little nuggets of information are the cherries on top of the wonderfully rich dessert of history that Sebag Montefiore serves up. Thankfully his style, and the easily digestible short chapters make it both easy to read, and easy to absorb the information.

Sebag Montefiore writes in the last pages of the book that "for 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic, and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer."

The history of this city is a history of rapine, destruction, and war. It is also a history of worship, ecstasy and wonder. It is a story of immigration, emigration, and cosmopolitanism. It is the story of a city that on many occasions threatened to die, but is in many ways the most important city on Earth. The origins of Jerusalem are obscure and biblical, although recent archaeology has proven that King David did in fact exist.

Until the arrival of the Romans, and sometimes even after, Jerusalem was a backwater. Holy to the Jews, it was of small interest to others apart from being an attractive place to loot, owing to the gold that was held in the Temple.

Rome and Herod brought some stability to Jerusalem, although religious fever often led to riots, and there was also a continuous underground of Jewish rebellion against Roman rule. This was mainly driven by Jewish fundamentalism; a belief that gentiles could not rule God's chosen people. Jesus was part of this milieu.

The disaster of AD70 when the Romans sacked the city and destroyed the Temple after yet another Jewish rebellion, signalled the end of any Jewish control of the city for nearly 1,900 years. Jews were expelled, and Jerusalem once again became a backwater.

After an interval of Byzantine rule, the Arabs took the city in AD630. Soon after came the building of the Dome of the Rock, which raised Jerusalem to a holy site for its third religion (and which has led to many of the trials and tribulations the city has suffered down the years). Montefiore explains that this move was partially political, as the ruler of Jerusalem, Abd Al-Malik did not control Mecca and so needed a counterweight to the shrine there.

While the Muslims tolerated both Christians and Jews, life was not easy for them under Islamic rule. The Crusaders however were worse. The Crusader Kings, who were essentially freebooters looking for land, were often dangerous to each other, but not as much as they were to both Jews and Muslims.

Saladin's relatively enlightened rule was but a short interlude between the Christian crusaders and the Mamluks and Ottomans, who ruled Jerusalem for 400 years. For most of that time the city was again a backwater - Jews were forbidden the Temple Mount, and Christian worship was heavily circumscribed (although the Christians seemed to rank ahead of the Jews in the eyes of the Pashas and Sultan).

As the Ottoman Empire sank into sloth and corruption, Western countries began to influence what happened at the centre of Christendom. Kings, Czars and Emperors vied with each other to endow churches, fund pilgrimages and gain the upper hand in the machinations to do with the operation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The rise of millenarian ideas in the USA and Britain led to a push to allow Jews back to Jerusalem so that biblical prophecies of the Armageddon could be fulfilled. Montefiore clearly explains how these ideas led to massive changes on the ground in Jerusalem (one of Montefiore's ancestors funded Jewish settlement there) and on policy. The Balfour Declaration was a ground-breaking change in geopolitical thinking, even though one of the major reasons it was made was to mobilise Jewish support for Britain's fight in World War One.

Montefiore brings the history up to the present with descriptions of the internecine terrorism performed by both Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate and beyond, and explains how so many chances to find a workable peace have been missed: when one side felt politically strong enough to offer terms, the other side was too weak to accept them.

The uneasy state of peace that currently entails in Jerusalem has come at the cost of almost total segregation of Jews, Muslims and Christians from each other, and the destruction of what was a unique culture. It seems that we humans have not learnt a thing from the history of this holy and benighted place.

There is so much more in this book than I have noted here - it is an accessible wonder, and well worth reading. You will learn a lot.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

 A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964

This is a handy little crib on the history of the Jewish people, rather than the Jewish faith. Of course, it can be difficult to separate the two; as Parkes writes in his introduction, "[t]he history of the Jews is the story of a people inextricably interwoven with that of a religion. Neither can be told apart from the other. It is obvious that there would be no story of Judaism if there were no Jews; but it is just as true that Jews would not have survived the long centuries of their total dispersion had there not been the cement of a religion moulded to their need either to transform or to tolerate the conditions of their corporate and individual lives."

Parkes' history shows a long tradition of a people trying as much as they can to accommodate themselves to the situation in which they existed at any one time. From the earliest days there were geographically diverse groups of people practicing the religion of Judaism, with more or less oppression from the powers of the time. There have only been very short periods of time when Jewish people have had the capacity to control their own polity - very early and very late in their history.

The story of the Jews after Classical times is one of interaction with both Christendom and Islam, and the changing fortunes of those relationships. Christendom very quickly began oppressing the Jews, as they saw them as a threat to the growth of their own religion. The Jews were, in Christian eyes, apostates, Christ-killers, and subverters of fellow Christians. Islam initially treated Jews much better than did Christians, but as the Muslim world shrunk in the face of Western Christian dominance of Europe and Africa, and Islam withdrew into itself, that relationship too became poisoned and died. During the secular age, rather than religious scares, the route of anti-Semitism runs along the lines of finance and conspiracy - the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi rantings about Jewish control of finance took the place of older tropes of Blood Libel and miscegenation.

Parkes explains how the Jews developed their faith and ideas in separation from each other - the Sephardic Spanish versus the Ashkenazi Central Europeans. While non-Jews were the people's biggest enemy, they were not averse to internecine conflict either. The destruction of the Temple and exclusion from Jerusalem meant that the old ways of Jewish worship had to change, through a "democratic" system of congregationalism, through to a "professional" structure of paid Rabbis. This is not gone into in great detail, but is fascinating to a non-Jewish reader such as myself.

The final section of the book deals with the horrors and hopes of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel. Parkes focusses on the British Mandate in Palestine, how something that began with such high hopes ended in disaster, with the British washing their hands (a la Pilate) of the problems they had created with a poorly thought-out plan to let Jews come back home. Written in 1964, this book doesn't cover much of the ongoing disaster that has come out of this recent history.

If you are a person who doesn't know much about Jewish history this book, although dated,  isn't the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson

 The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson

London: A Panther Book, 1971   (First published 1969)

This is a solid work of journalism, in which Knightley and Simpson investigate the life of T.E. Lawrence using information that had recently come to life, from de-classified documents and testimony of friends and those who worked with him both in Arabia, and in England after the War.

What do we learn about this most enigmatic hero? Firstly, that he was not necessarily the idealistic seeker for Arab freedom that he portrayed in his writings. He was a soldier of the King, and used his undoubted charisma and intelligence to inveigle the Arab Revolt to work for the Entente war effort, all the while knowing that it was extremely unlikely that any Arabs would have self-determination in their or his lifetime.

Secondly, that despite his desire to return to the anonymity of the ranks after the end of Versailles, he could not help but to get involved in policy, particularly the development of the RAF. He was always scheming, plotting and writing letters to the head of the Force (Trenchard), MPs, or even the likes of Lady Astor. While sometimes his meddling was not welcome, others of his ideas continue today; he basically invented the idea of air sea rescue, and designed many of the early rescue launches of the RAF.

Thirdly - and perhaps today less shocking to the reader than it was when this book was written - was that Lawrence suffered depressive illness throughout his life, and the guilt he felt over his actions led him to engage in masochistic acts, both when he was in Arabia, by pushing himself beyond endurance, and back in England, where he degraded himself by serving in the ranks, and by having people beat him with a birch. The torturous stories he invented to justify his birching, especially those given to John Bruce, show a man at the end of his tether.

It was the Arab revolt that in many ways destroyed Lawrence, even as it was the making of him as a public figure. Not only the warfare in the desert, but the (to Lawrence) shamefulness of his lying to Faisal and Hussein and the act of writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom all took a heavy toll on his psyche. He had plans for other literary works, but his death only ten weeks after being discharged from the RAF put paid to that.

Knightley and Simpson also attempt to clear up the identity of S.A., to whom Seven Pillars of Wisdom is dedicated. They fairly convincingly conclude that it was Lawrence's friend Salim Ahmed, who was known as Dahoum. What they failed to get to the bottom of was Lawrence's sexuality; it seems he was sexless. There are also questions about his infamous night in Deraa, or at least the version of it as portrayed in his writings, with which some of the known facts conflict. It seems, from investigation, that Hacim Muhittin Bey was aggressively heterosexual, and would seem an unlikely instigator of buggery. Given the conflicting accounts, I do wonder whether Lawrence couldn't bring himself to write that he was raped by mere rankers, and had to inflate his attacker's status to that of Governor.

Overall then, this book is a good counter-factual to the story that Lawrence would have liked us to believe was true. In no way does it diminish his status as a hero of World War One, but it does bring us the complete man much more than we see in his own writings. If you can hunt out this book, and you are interested in Lawrence of Arabia, then it's well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Six Day War by Randolph and Winston Churchill

 The Six Day War by Randolph S. Churchill and Winston S. Churchill

London: Heinemann, 1970 (first published 1967, reprinted with postscript 1970)

The Six Day War is receding into history now, but still resonates as one of the most amazing feats of arms in the history of warfare. In a carefully planned and immaculately executed series of attacks and battles, the Israeli Defence Forces overwhelmed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in the space of a week. Facing a crisis that threatened the end of their country, the Israelis struck first, annihilated the military forces of their enemies, and changed the strategic map of the Middle East, a change that still resonates today.

This book, written at the time by the son and grandson of Winston Churchill, is a very good piece of reportage and battle reporting. We get a good introduction of the events leading up to the War, the closure of the Straits of Tiran and the provocations of Nasser. A concise description of the Orders of Battle describe the advantage of the Arab forces over Israel. Of course material is one thing, morale and tactical superiority is another.

The key to Israeli victory was the Air Force. Their pre-emptive attack, which effectively destroyed the Egyptian Air Force, meant that not only were the cities of Israel safe from bombardment, but also the Israeli armour could move unmolested by air attack through the Sinai, which they did with incredible speed and ruthlessness. The Egyptians were completely overwhelmed, losing hundreds of aircraft, tanks, artillery pieces and thousands of men.

The Israeli government and military had made the decision that, while they would attack Egypt, they would not instigate hostilities against Jordan or Syria. The Jordanians however, in support of their allies, attacked the Israeli forces around Jerusalem. After vicious fighting, the Israelis took Jerusalem and all of the West Bank.

They then went on to take the Golan Heights from Syria before agreeing to a UN ceasefire. In six days Israel had militarily secured its future, driven a stake through the heart of Arab unity, and had opened up a chance to completely change the politics of the Middle East. The postscript in this updated edition describes how that chance to re-shape the Middle East was slipping between the collective fingers of Israel, the Arab countries, the USA and USSR. As we now know, the 1967 war, while it guaranteed Israel's existence, did not create a lasting peace. War has continued, although something has happened that was unforeseen at the time of the writing of this book, and that is that Israel has been recognized by many of the countries that they fought in 1967.

This book is a well-written, pacy and informative summation of the build up, the battles and the immediate aftermath of the war.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence

 Seven Pillars of Wisdom: a Triumph by T.E. Lawrence

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Jonathan Cape, 1975 printing

(First published privately in 1926, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1935, and by Penguin in 1962)

ISBN 0140016961

I first read Seven Pillars of Wisdom at university, which is when I suspect many young men read it, at least in the 70s and 80s, when the book had almost a cult status with those who would like to think they were in some way intellectual. Like many others of impressionable age at an impressionable time in their lives, I was very impressed by it. I still have the copy I purchased second-hand in the Monash University co-op, and I note that I paid the then (for me) princely sum of five dollars, which was the equivalent of several beers or a decent meal at that stage in my life.

I had always intended re-reading the book, but have been put off the task over the years by the notion that it was a book for young men, and that those wearied by the natural cynicism of age had found it just so much twaddle when they went back to it. That was my father's advice to me as well, and I didn't want to destroy my good opinion of the book. But then lockdown hit, and I've had a bit of a project to read some classic works, so I decided to bite the bullet and risk destroying an icon after watching an interesting television documentary about Lawrence that got me thinking about him, and Seven Pillars.

Is it as good as I remember? No. Is it just so much twaddle? No. Is it a great classic? Of that I'm not sure. It is definitely more than an exciting narrative of someone's wartime adventures, but it is also definitely less than a great work of literature. What it most definitely is, is an insight into the complex and difficult character that was T.E. Lawrence.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ostensibly about the Arab Revolt and the consequent battle of the Arabs against the Turks from Medina to Damascus, is actually about the wish-fulfilment of Lawrence's dreams to become famous, by whatever means became open to him. He admits as much several times in the book, while going on to admit that in fulfilling his wishes, he destroyed his soul through lying, killing, and the degradations that came to him during the campaign.

His opportunity, which came about when he was appointed liaison and intelligence officer to Feisal, became a legend, and he burnishes the legend (while seeming to deprecate it) in this book. He claims to run not only the Arabs, but also the British intervention in their theatre of war, explaining how his intelligence and forward thinking ran rings not only around the Arabs, who he describes as petty and unthinking, but also the British staff officers, who in his eyes are hide-bound and old-fashioned.

The book is a series of descriptions of his travels throughout the theatre, and some of the actions in which he took part, and of some of the characters he met along the way. Anyone who agreed with him, or fell in with his ideas, is painted glowingly, and those that didn't are not. The best parts of the book are his descriptions of his travels through the Hejaz and Jordan, with his writing placing the reader on the back of the camel with him, feeling his tiredness and hunger, and elation at arriving at a well-watered camp.

It is when he switches to mystic mode that the book suffers. Like many young idealistic men, his ideas about the beauty of man's struggle, of the meaning of war and society, and of the differences between men are incohate and hard to decipher in any meaningful way. He wishes to bring the Arabs into their hegemony, and so tries in his writing to make them more than they were: to create castles and kings from tents and wandering nomads. 

There is no doubt that Lawrence was a troubled soul. His upbringing was harsh, and sexually he was not classifiable, and there are passages in Seven Pillars of Wisdom where he revels in the degradation forced on him through his wanderings with the Arab tribes. He seems to have a theory that beauty and truth are unobtainable in the physical world, and so one should eschew the physical and in fact try and destroy it. There is no doubt in my mind that by the end of the campaign Lawrence was suffering mentally from his trials, and he just made it over the line in Damascus, so that the prize that he had been hoping for came to him as a bitter fruit indeed.

His mental state was definitely affected by his capture torture and rape in Deraa, which I think led not only to him hating the Turks, but also to hating the Arabs. In a strange way the reader gets the feeling that Lawrence almost felt that he'd deserved such punishment, and after the incident on several occasions the reader finds Lawrence uncaring about whether he lives or dies.

It struck me while reading the book that Lawrence is very much a precursor to the modern age, and the modern person. It is all about him, everything is done according to his plan, and other people are just so many chessmen to be placed on the board. It strikes me that Lawrence would have been a natural on social media, an influencer and icon.

There is no doubt that Lawrence hoped that Seven Pillars of Wisdom would become a great classic - a classic of endurance, of struggle and overcoming, and of the mystical beauty of a people and their history. That he failed in achieving that I think he knew, and we know as well. However, it is still a fine book, a worthy book, and no doubt a book that will continue to inspire those young men who find it at the right time in their lives.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Did Muhammad exist? by Robert Spencer

Did Muhammad exist? : an inquiry into Islam's obscure origins by Robert Spencer

Wilmington Delaware: ISI Books, 2012               ISBN 9781610170611


Robert Spencer is a somewhat controversial author and commentator, perhaps best known for his jihadwatch website, and his polemical books about Islam. This book, while no doubt having controversial things to say, is not a polemic, but a look at the current state of study into the origins not so much about Muhammad himself, but the Koran.

Of the three main monotheistic religions, it is Islam that claims the most historicity for it's origins. Muhammad lived in the late 6th and early 7th century, was a prophet and warrior, and received the Koran in a series of revelations from the Angel Gabriel around Mecca and Medina. The problem with this seemingly historical statement is that the more it is investigated, the harder it is to pin down.

There is no mention in other historical sources of Muhammad, or the Koran itself, for over a hundred years from the supposed date of Muhammad's death. In fact between the date of Muhammad's death and the first mention of the Koran, coins were produced and buildings erected that seem to suggest the local rulers in Arabia were, if anything, Christians of a sort. It is only in the 9th century that something that we would recognise as Islam appeared in the historical record.

How to account for this gap in the story? It is clear that  both the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates were keen to enlist God as a partisan on their side, and had seen how religion could unify otherwise separate peoples into a large empire. It is also clear that large parts of the text of what came to be the Koran had existed for some time as separate fragments before being collected into one book. It also seems to be true that there did exist at some time in the 7th century in Arabia a "prophet armed with a sword". Spencer's theory is that the Caliphs were responsible for putting these disparate facts together to create a religion that could justify their rule.

The Koran itself is the major item under scrutiny in this book. Notoriously hard to interpret, recent study is bringing to light several sources of the suras of the Koran and leading to some extraordinary conclusions by some scholars. There can be an argument made that some of the text originated from Christian communities that denied the Trinity. These texts, which would have been in the Syraic language, were adapted as needed, with additions where required, to create the Koran as we have it now. These theories can explain some of the mysteries of the text itself, and also possibly the meaning behind some of the seemingly contradictory statements made in the Koran about Jews and Christians: they are due to the accretions made over time to original Christian sect texts.

Even the name Muhammad itself then comes into question - meaning "praiseworthy", the name itself is only mentioned four times in the Koran, and each time it could possibly be referring to Jesus, or other figures, rather than to a person named Muhammad himself.

The historiography of religious texts is a notoriously fraught business, and possibly no text is more difficult to look at than the Koran, as not only is it seen by Muslims as the literal word of God, but also is seen as a definite historical artifact emanating from a known point in history from a known person. Both the Jewish and the Christian Bibles have been studied historically for a long time, and Koranic studies have a long way to go in this area.

Did Muhammad exist? is an interesting work that gathers together some of the threads of current research into early Islam. There is a decent bibliography for further reading, and both the notes and the index are helpful.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Philby of Arabia by Elizabeth Monroe

Philby of Arabia by Elizabeth Monroe

London: Quartet Books, 1980                         ISBN 0714333465

It's a sad state of affairs that when one mentions the name Philby usually the first person to be discussed is Kim, the Soviet Spy and British traitor. His Father, Harry (known as St. John) Philby, or as he came to be known "Philby of Arabia", is a more fascinating man for all sorts of reasons.

In this book Elizabeth Monroe has done a serviceable job of relaying a life of a driven, difficult, yet talented man who carved out his own niche in the history of the political development of the Middle East, and in exploring both the geography and history of much of the Arabian Peninsula. 

The subject of a broken home, Philby exhibited his precocious talent early, winning an exhibition to the famous Westminster School, and on to Trinity College at Cambridge. His mother's lack of means meant that rather than continue on at University he went to India to work in the civil service, where his quick facility for languages served him well, but where his quick temper and forthright views served him less so. He was seen early on as a bit of a "queer fish" owing to his mingling with the locals, and his developing views on Indian independence, although in many other ways Philby was English to his core, never losing his love of London club life, or watching cricket at Lords.

Like many men of his era, World War One was a turning point in his life. He chafed to be of use to his country, and eventually found his way to Mesopotamia, where he worked with the governing forces. He never saw action, but became a vital member of the civil government for a time. However, his forceful nature and inability to compromise saw him lose favour with the powers that be, which was a constant theme in his life. He did have his supporters though and they suggested he be sent to gauge the political outlook of Ibn Saud, the major Sheikh in Arabia during the War. Philby, in the course of this task, became the first European to traverse Arabia from East to West, and was one of the first to enter Riyadh and stay there for any length of time. He became friends with Saud, and in his impulsive way, saw Saud as the true liberator and ruler of all the Arabs. Because Philby was a man who only saw things in black-and-white, this meant that he was totally opposed to Hashemite rule in Arabia, which again brought him into conflict with the British Government. He played a small part in the negotiations around the political shape of the Arabian peninsula after the War, but was never able to grasp the bigger picture, failing even to see that Ibn Saud was following an agenda different to the one Philby thought he should.

Philby though had seen one thing - that his future lay in Arabia. He revealingly wrote to his long-suffering wife, Dora - who was left in England for long periods without much money to bring up their children - that he was desperate for fame, and he felt that Arabia was the place for him to find it. He had written a book about his wartime journey, and was seen as something of an Arabian expert, so was hired by a company to represent them in Arabia. It took several "lean years" before he could turn his friendship with Saud into a profitable one, years in which he further antagonised the British government with his outspoken writings suggesting Arabia should be independent. During these years he also converted to Islam, which seems to have been driven by practical motives as it enabled him to be with the King in the Holy City of Mecca - Philby never seems to have been a very religious man.

His business career began to meet with some success in the 1930s, and he was given permission by the King for the first of his Arabian journeys, into the Empty Quarter. Although Philby in many ways was not a nice person, he was a good explorer and mapmaker, producing quality geographical information on his trips, as well as collecting interesting specimens of wildlife. Philby being Philby, he also caused a diplomatic incident when he entered Yemen without permission, which made Ibn Saud wary of giving him permission to explore in similar areas near the border.

World War Two saw Philby spend some time under arrest in Britain for his views on Britain and its Middle Eastern Policy: Philby thoughout his life could never understand why his outspokenness may not be welcome, and always saw himself as a loyal but critical Englishman. His short foray into politics was similarly damaged by his outspoken nature, gathering only 526 votes the only time he stood for office.

After the war he was back in Arabia, living well until the demise of Ibn Saud, which included starting another family with a girl given to him by the King. In the 1950s he made several expeditions into the ancient lands of Midian, before being for a time banished from the Kingdom after Saud's death, for criticism of the Kingdom's growing problem with corruption and greed.

Philby eventually was welcomed back, but by this time he was an old man, and eventually died at his son Kim's home in Beirut in 1960. By this time Kim was already under pressure, with speculation about him being "the third man" rife: he fled to the Soviet Union shortly after his father's death.

Philby's legacy is his exploration and mapping work, with the results of his Midian expedition with Rykmans still being written about to this day. His was one of the last of those lives lived when an Englishman could impose himself anywhere in the world and live a life worth writing about. A fascinating man, this book is a good introduction to him and his achievements.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Arabian travellers by Richard Trench

Arabian travellers by Richard Trench

London: Macmillan, 1986                ISBN 0333428897

There is no doubt that the Arabian peninsula held a continuing fascination for Europeans from the Enlightenment through to the Twentieth Century. The ancient European knowledge of the Peninsula was gradually lost in the Middle Ages, and from then on it was a land shrouded in mystery, partly due to religious differences, and partly due to the lack of trade between the two areas.

This book, in an attractively presented and lavishly illustrated format, gives a quick overview of the major European journeys and explorations in Arabia from about 1500, ending with Wilfred Thesiger's traversal of the Empty Quarter (Thesiger wrote the forward to this book). As such it is a useful introduction to the major players in Europe's interaction with the Peninsula and the people.

And what a strage cast the players are in this work. From those who were escaping their own lives, or a Europe that they couldn't get on with, to those hoping for fortune, those seeking God and those just seeking the desert, a more mixed bunch of men and women would be hard to find.

The first inspiration to travel to Arabia was to attempt to reach the forbidden city of Mecca, which was the driving force behind many of the travellers, including Burkhardt and Burton. There were also more or less succssful expeditions sponsored by European powers to try and increase trade opportunities.

These travellers were superceded by those with a more romantic bent, who saw in the lifestyle of the Bedouin something akin to what they imagined to be man's natural noble state. The reality, as they were to find, was somewhat different, even though to some, like the Blunts, the reality didn't shake their convictions in that regard.

Blunt was the inspiration of many of the later travellers and warriors such as Shakespear, Gertrude Bell, Lawrence, Philby and Bertam Thomas. By this time travels in the Peninsula became part of the "Great Game", with many of the former names belonging to agents of the British Government in one form or another, with designs on the loyalty of the people and the sovreignity of the land.

Trench covers all this in a brief but entertaining fashion, letting the travellers speak for themselves when appropriate (for most produced books and pictures on their travels, sometimes at danger to their wellbeing).

Each chapter covers a certain time-period and several travellers, with the exception of Doughty, who gets a chapter to himself. The inspiration for Lawrence's activities in Arabia, Doughty was truly a unique individual, unshakeable in his beliefs, who refused to disguise himself as Moslem, which almost led to his death on more than one occasion. He is without doubt one of history's strangest characters, and while it could be said that all his travels resulted in was a long and impenetrable book, the fact that he was the inspiration for Lawrence means that  his travels led in a round-about way to the current division of Arabia at the end of WWI, which has led to such angst and bloodshed ever since.

The illustrations in this edition are wonderful, the maps are good if a little crowded, and there is a useful bibliography and index. As an introduction to an interesting subject and and overview of an interesting intersection in history, this book is recommended.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell