Farewell to Arabia

(London: Faber and Faber, 1966). 8vo; original tan cloth; price-clipped laminated pictorial dustwrapper; pp. 268, incl. index; plates; maps. Ex-library copy. Dustwrapper a little scuffed; portion cut from front free endpaper; ink stamps, label scars and codes to front endpaper; ink-stamps also to prelims., fore-edge, and final printed page. Good. "Since 1956 - the year of Suez - events in Arabia have moved fast; so fast that the old world of Lawrence and Doughty, of Philby and Bertram Thomas and Thesiger has been replaced, in a sense, by a new Arabia - an Arabia uninterested in that long, romantic love-affair between herself and the Occident which for so many generations engaged the imagination and the heart of Western man. All the major events of the past ten years ... reflect or have created radically new relationships within Arabia and between Arabia and the rest of the world. David Holden, now the Sunday Times special correspondent on Foreign Affairs, knows Arabia as well as anyone else today. He has written a brilliant and gripping survey which is as much a welcome to the new Arabia as it is a farewell to the old." .