Michael Goldfarb

The Price of Black Gold

Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq

By

Bodley Head 464pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

Oil. It’s a nasty business and has been for at least the last 130 years, as modern life came to be almost wholly dependent on petroleum products. It is an incredibly lucrative business for the millions of people who prospect for it, extract it and sell it; for those who run countries that possess it; and for those whose pensions depend on the continued profitability of the big oil companies. Oil has also spawned many ancillary markets, not least the writing of books criticising its nefarious impact on governance and the poor, honest people of the world. There is money to be made in these books, as Naomi Klein’s sales figures show. That has to be a primary reason that a major trade publisher like The Bodley Head decided to bring out this overly dense, often incomprehensible effort by Greg Muttitt.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    Follow Us