Hazhir Teimourian

Bob Of Arabia

The War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

By

Fourth Estate 1300pp £25 order from our bookshop

This tombstone of a book will make Robert Fisk an even greater star. Only a few of us will wonder whether he should have written it at all. It is deeply moving in places, maddening in others – just like the man himself.

I first met Fisk soon after Saddam Hussein started his ‘Whirlwind War’ against Iran in September 1980, a war that was to last eight years and kill between 700,000 and a million people. The late Charles Douglas-Home of The Times called me into his office to ask where Fisk ought to go next. I said ‘Baghdad’ and Fisk fell down in a mock faint to show he had yet to recover from his previous exertions.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Start your week with a dose of Russian Revolutionary zeal. Donald Rayfield reviews Tobie Mathew's 'Greetings From t… ,
    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    Follow Us