Birth: 1/5/1935 Death:29/8/2012
Born in Bethany (near Jerusalem) in 1935; attended university in the US and subsequently became a correspondent for Radio Free Europe, where he served as a reporter in lieu of his US Army service; later became a correspondent for The Daily Mail; consulted on Middle East business for 12 years and was an advisor to the Iraqi government in the 1970s/80s; returned to full time writing in 1983 and contributing to different papers, incl. The Sunday Times, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Washington Post, Spectator, Liberation, La Vanguardia, LA Times, Jolland-Posten and Al-Quds where he was a columnist for three years, and authoring many books, incl. Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family (Tauris, 1988), The Forgotten Faithful: The Christians of the Holy Land (Quartet Books, 1993), A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and his controversial biographies Saddam Hussein (Bloomsbury, 2001), The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (Palgrave MacMillan, 1996), Arafat: from Defender to Dictator (Bloomsbury. 1999) and Nasser: The Last Arab (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004); writer and journalist based in London, died on August 29th 2012.
