In this revealing memoir, newspaper editor Abdul Bari Atwan recounts with humour and honesty his journey from Palestinian refugee camps to the front page. He depicts both the horror of camp massacres and the unexpected consequences of Britain’s involvement in the region.
Atwan shares his many extraordinary encounters, including tea with Margaret Thatcher, a weekend with Osama bin Laden, intimate meetings with Yasser Arafat, and the row between Colonel Gaddafi and the Shah of Iran that earned him his first journalistic break.
Abdul Bari Atwan was born in Gaza in 1950, left aged seventeen and has since become one of the world’s foremost commentators on the Middle East, for the last twenty years editing the independent Arabic daily, London-based al-Quds al-Arabi.
Ian Black is the Middle Eastern editor for The Guardian.
