The joys and pains of solitude

Life in Iraq may not be half as apocalyptic as the media would suggest, but it is still sufficiently turbulent to welcome the reissue of Victor Winstone’s classic biography of Gertrude Bell, Arabist, explorer, archaeologist, snob and co-founder of the Iraqi state. Originally published in 1978, it has been updated to include the most recent conflict in the Middle East. This is a shame and disappointment, because much of Winstone’s revised introduction reads like a teenage diatribe against Israel and America. It is not worthy of his fine study of this remarkable woman’s life.

He writes contemptuously of the ‘disgracefully named’ ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign, claims that past mistakes were repeated with ‘sinister exactness’, and detects ‘a sinister American-Israeli claim to hegemony’. ‘The motives of these modern campaigns, the erosion of Palestinian rights and hopes and the determination to immobilise Iraq, are all too clear,’ he concludes. They aren’t all that clear in Baghdad, where one sees the Coalition manfully doing its best to stabilise and reconstruct the country.