ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks for their help in the articles that make up this book go to Anas al-Abdeh, head of the Movement for Justice and Development in Syria; Taner Akçam, Turkish historian; Taiseer Alouni of al-Jazeera; Terry Anderson, former AP bureau chief in Beirut and the longest-held hostage in Lebanon; Vietnam veteran George W. Appenzeller; Laila al-Arian, daughter of Palestinian prisoner Sami al-Arian; the late Ane-Karine Arvesen, Norwegian diplomat; Armenian historian Peter Balakian; Dr Mona el-Baradei of Cairo University’s politics department; Antoine Bechir of Beirut; Mohsen Bilal, former Syrian information minister; Andrea Bistrich for permission to quote from her letter to me on the death of her lover Christian Kleinert; ex-Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco; Vincent Browne, Irish journalist; Pat and Alice Carey of Ireland; Tony Clifton, formerly of Newsweek; Denise Epstein, daughter of Irène Némirovsky; Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University, Chicago; my late parents, William and Peggy Fisk; diver Christian Francis of Enfeh, Lebanon; Jim Harland of Blyth, Northumberland; Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker; Marion Irvine, sister of Bill Cadman who was killed on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie; Adrien Jaulmes of Le Figaro; Walid and Nora Jumblatt of Lebanon; Dr Antony Loewenstein of Melbourne University; Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud; Samia Melki of Beirut; Peter Metcalfe for his superlative knowledge of T. E. Lawrence; Captain Ramzi Najjar, formerly of Middle East Airlines; the British National Archives at Kew for permission to quote from Colonial Office papers on the Grand Mufti in Beirut; Dr Michael Noll of Valdosta State University, Georgia, USA; film-maker and journalist Nelofer Pazira; the late Mstislav Rostropovich; Michele Santoro, formerly of Italian television RAI 2; Dr David Shotter, formerly of Lancaster University classics department; Eric Stackhouse, for taking me to the Titanic cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Melanie Storoschuk, formerly of HarperCollins, Toronto; Perouz Taslakian of McGill University, Montreal; Stephen Williams for his translation of Dean Swift’s epitaph; former Afghan refugee Mohamed Ziya. My thanks also to Encyclopaedia Britannica for permission to reproduce T. E. Lawrence’s 1929 article ‘Guerrilla’.

Finally, my immense gratitude, as always, goes to my Editor at The Independent, Simon Kelner, who allows me to be his Middle East Correspondent and to compile books at the same time (he also suffers me to tour the world lecturing - even when his man in Beirut phones in from São Paulo or Los Angeles!); to The Independent for permission to quote from my columns in the paper; to Louise Haines, my indefatigable editor at 4th Estate, and to Steve Cox, the sharpest ‘reader’ in the publishing industry. Very lastly, to Adrian Hamilton, my features editor at The Independent, who has never - ever - complained about anything I have written for him and whose help in collecting my writing over five years has been invaluable.

I have chosen to ‘theme’ the articles in this book in order to give them a coherence that a strict adherence to chronology would lose. A few have been cut to avoid repetition. Several errors of fact, which necessarily creep into journalism, have been corrected. But the opinions and predictions - those that proved to be true and those that turned out to be lamentably wrong - remain as they were originally printed. Only I am to blame, of course, for omissions or mistakes.