This present book was mainly conceived in discussions I had, after leaving Beirut in 1981, with Edward Hodgkin in Milton Abbas, and with Albert Hourani and Roger Owen, past and present Directors of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford. Between them, they convinced me I could write it, and sharpened my ideas of what should go into it. To them are due my first thanks.

The book would never have got any further, however, without the timely help of two fine American universities. I would like to thank Benjamin H. Brown of Harvard's Center for International Affairs for the support the Center afforded me in mid-1982. The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University then provided a professional home for me throughout the academic year 1982-83, and I am extremely grateful both for the academic insights provided by CCAS Director Michael C. Hudson and other members of the Georgetown faculty, and for the practical help given by Zeina Seikaly and her colleagues in the CCAS's administration. Iman Bibars and Zaha Bustami gave valuable help with some of the Arabic documentary sources, while Sophie Rentz in the Near East Department of the Library of Congress, like Julie Blattner in the CFIA's library in Harvard before her, provided an ever helpful guide to the collections.

Many, many other people have contributed – wittingly or unwittingly, directly or indirectly – to the present work. Two Foreign Editors at the Christian Science Monitor were always asking the right sorts of question, and (which is even rarer in the newspaper business) waiting till I felt I had the answers nearly right: they were the late Geoffrey Godsell and David Anable.