Dimensions
159 x 240 x 37mm
The story of the catastrophic British mishandling of the Middle East, told through the career of Sir Mark Sykes – Edwardian aristocrat, traveller, writer, politician and co-author of the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, a shady deal between Entente powers to carve up the Middle East that lies at the heart of many of region's problems today. At the age of only 36 Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to a reviled and notorious treaty, drawn up in May 1916 between the French and the British, that divided up the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the event of an allied victory in World War One. Written without any Arab involvement, it negated an earlier promise that the British Government had made to the Arabs that they would gain independence. Drawn up in secret, a controversy has raged around it ever since. A century after its signature, the region is still dominated by political corruption and vicious ethnic and sectarian violence.But Sir Mark Sykes was not the blimpish, ignorant Englishman of repute. From a childhood and early life spent exploring and travelling in the region, reading deeply and learning the languages, Sykes was appointed to Kitchener's staff during WWI, was Political Secretary to the War Cabinet and a member of the Committee set up to consider the future of Asiatic Turkey, where he was thirty years younger than any of the other members. Experienced, knowledgeable, a brilliant caricaturist, he was considered the ideal diplomat for the task of finding a peaceful solution in the Middle East.He was unrelenting in this search and worked himself to death just two years later, following the Paris Peace Conference, a victim of exhaustion and the Spanish Flu. Drawing from previously undisclosed family letters, Christopher Sykes has written an insightful and lively biography of his grandfather that overturns preconceived notions of this man, gives a vivid account of Europe and the Middle East and analyses the intractable issues that have caused such havoc in the region.
