Many people in the Middle East and elsewhere - political leaders, ministers, officials, soldiers, scholars, colleagues, and friends, including the late President Nasser - gave me valuable help directly or indirectly in the writing of this book. I am deeply grateful to all of them, but I would particularly like to thank Mohammed Hassanein Heykal, editor-in-chief of Al Ahram, for his generous help, advice, and information; Ahmed Baha’ ad-din, editor-in-chief of Al Mussawar and Dar el Hilal publications, for general good advice; the UAR Information Department in Cairo and the London embassies of the UAR, Jordan, and Israel; King Hussein of Jordan, Salah ed-din el Bitar, Abdullah Mohammed Nomaan, Khaled Mohieddin, Yigal Allon, Lord Robertson of Oakridge, Sir Ralph Stevenson and General Rikhye for their help in clarifying various points; and Walid el Khalidi, Abdul Rahman Bushnaq, Albert Hourani, Tom Little and my colleagues on the Observer, Patrick Seale, Gavin Young, and Colin Legum, for their friendly enlightenment on Middle Eastern affairs over many years. Needless to say, except where otherwise stated, those named above are not responsible for the opinions and conclusions expressed in the following pages, which are my own.President Nasser’s sudden death in September 1970 at the age of fifty-two had an international impact the scale of which reflected both his own political stature and the critical state of affairs in the Middle East and the Arab world, which he had dominated for eighteen years. The aim of this book is to give a coherent account of Nasser’s life and career for the general reader and to describe the historical circumstances which helped to form his political character and ideas. It will also try to distinguish what, if anything, was his own distinctive contribution to political thought or practice. Because it deals with such recent history, it obviously cannot be more than an interim study.In January when N .ssei had just entered his fiftieth year and had already been ruling Egypt for thirteen years, I went to see him in Cairo. It was my third meeting with him, the previous occasions being in (? saw him for the last time in July 1969, the year before he died). Like the earlier meetings, this one took place at his house at Manshiet el Bakr on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, an expanded version of the suburban villa he occupied as a lieutenant-colonel. He received me without fussing the small formal drawing room where he usually saw journalists. Its Louis XV-type furniture and chandeliers - conventional official style and the norm of aspiring Egyptian bourgeois taste - and signed photographs of other statesmen, with Nehru and Tito in pride of place, were described in many newspaper interviews.