Middle East

Lionel Kochan profiles one of the leading bankers among British Jews, who devoted fifty years of his long life to the welfare of Jewry overseas and the future of Palestine.

Victorian travellers had made Arab studies a romantic discipline; but, writes Alaric Jacob, British involvement in Arab affairs arose from the First World War.

Lord Balfour, then Foreign Secretary, announced that he viewed with favour a national home for the Jews in Palestine. I.T. Naamani examines the philosophical writings of a remarkable British statesman.

Andrew Lycett untangles the complex story of how the West’s involvement in Middle Eastern affairs has been interpreted by historians.

Since the end of the Second World War, writes J. Garston, there has been an enormous increase in Aden’s importance, both commercial and strategic.

Cyril Falls profiles perhaps the ideal soldier in war and, certainly, the ideal British Commander-in-Chief.

For forty years, ruler of an alien country, Mohammed Ali attempted a revolution from which Egypt might have emerged into the twentieth century “as a small-scale Japan.”  

The ‘little town’ celebrated by western Christians as the location of the Nativity is much more than a stylised depiction evoked in Christmas cards each December, says Jacob Norris. 

From their origins in the 13th century until the suppression of the Sufis by Atatürk, the whirling dervishes symbolized their beliefs through their ecstatic dances.