Do governments sometimes want to prevent us from learning the truth? How long does such truth remain hidden before it forces its way out into the open? Or do they rely on us in due course forgetting all about it?
This book sets out the story of how an inconvenient truth was concealed from the British people in the period just after World War One… and continues to be obfuscated by the British Government today. It is a journey through a trail of secret documents relating to a highly sensitive incident in modern diplomatic history that has led to events the crucial ramifications of which are still with us now.
If you enjoy, as I do, learning about how inconvenient truths are held back for long periods, in this case for over a century, then you might well be enthralled by Peter Shambrook’s detailed, evidence-filled account demonstrating how Palestine was twice promised by the British Government, first to the Arabs, then to the Jews…
The author has dispassionately assembled an incontrovertible case conclusively and rationally, in the process turning previous scholarship on its head. You are sure to be excited by the conclusions it draws, which remain highly relevant to this day.
'A magnificent new book ... a major historical achievement'
Peter Oborne, Middle East Eye
In this eye-opening book, Peter Shambrook delves into the secret correspondence between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and the Sharif of Mecca during the First World War. McMahon promised the Sharif an independent Arab state, including Palestine, after the war, in exchange for his alliance with Britain against the Ottomans. But what happened next changed the course of history.
Despite the promises made, two years later Lloyd George's government declared that Palestine would be for the global Jewish community. Shambrook's meticulous analysis…
I didn’t know that this celebrated author had published such a readable novel on this intriguing topic as long ago as 1955.
In a page-turning narrative that cuts near to the bone in the way it presents the modes through which a modern religious cult is conceived and launched into the world, Vidal employs the kind of attention to imagined historical detail that we find in his better-known slightly later novel Julian (based upon the real-life figure of Julian the Apostate).
The Messiah is actually about a still highly relevant subject – where do the truth and the power behind comparable movements lie? Read how three chief disciples, a female mystic, a writer, and an advertising executive, surround the Messiah John Cave. How one of them actually has him murdered, and how afterwards they report, manipulate and fight over the details of his life and the meaning of his teachings.
Compare John Cave’s death cult with more recent ones in Guyana and Wako… Forget the myths and the conspiracy theories that abound today. Let Vidal engage your mind as he probes the fascination that deception and struggles for power over religion still hold for us. And think about how the manipulation of religions and their doctrines continues into modern times.
When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Gore Vidal's deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult.
Robert Service’s unbiased analytical biography Lenin, discloses a range of important new insights about its subject, drawn from original research. Legends and erasures based on previous political hagiography are neatly set aside. The remarkably driven, intellectually acid, and in some ways autistic character that emerges comes across as one of the most influential political movers of the last century. If he was cold and austere when it came to dispensing affection to his family and closest companions, Lenin was surprisingly bourgeois in his habits while remaining disinterested in the real lives of the working classes of Russia.
Service shows how the execution of his brother by the Romanovs engendered in him a vindictive and unquenchable urge for payback, accomplished when in 1918 a local Bolshevik firing squad executed almost the entire royal family in Siberia. It was an act that Lenin endorsed but did not openly authorize.
The author eschews making estimates of the degree of Lenin’s responsibility for the catastrophes that befell the Soviet peoples during the reign of his successor Stalin. His book, plainly written and filled with new information, including material concerning Lenin’s personal relations and his unbroadcast blood-curdling calls for repression, should engage the mind of the inquiring reader amply repaying the attention needed to consume its 500 pages!
Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-century history cannot be underestimated. Robert Service has written a calmly authoritative biography on this seemingly unknowable figure. Making use of recently opened archives, he has been able to piece together the private as well as the public life, giving the first complete picture of Lenin.
This biography simultaneously provides an account of one of the greatest turning points in modern history. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service examines events such as the October Revolution and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the one-party state, economic modernisation, dictatorship, and the politics of inter-war…
An innovative analysis of modernity and Orientalist discourses in Iranian millenarian movements, Religion, Orientalism, and Modernity explores the emergence in Iran of the revolutionary Babis and reformist Baha'is and their conflict with Shi'a Muslims, and of the parallel Ahmadi movement in North India.
It supplies fresh insights into the writings that defined these innovatory movements, penned by their proponents partially under the influence of Western interpreters.
A comparison of these movements shows that, together, they define important aspects of Islamic modernity. Focusing on the two case studies reveals similarities and differences in the answers they supplied to a perceived need for change and renewal of religious authority, and the responses to these on the part of mainstream Muslims.
