The Man Who Created the Middle East is an attempt by Christopher Sykes to overturn “preconceived notions” about his grandfather, Sir Mark Sykes, a man whose name epitomises colonial arrogance and aristocratic ignorance. But can he save one of the most tarnished reputations in the Middle East?

Mark Sykes was one half of an Anglo-French double act that negotiated how their governments might divide the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman armies. The result, the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, was a series of lines drawn across the Middle East establishing British and French “areas of influence”. This secret agreement, made halfway through the first world war and with Russian approval, has drawn so much criticism because it ignored the interests of the region and because it contradicted promises made to local leaders. Most obviously it went against the promises of autonomy made to the leaders of the Arab Revolt: when TE Lawrence heard about it, he recognised that “we are calling on them to fight for us on a lie”.

TE Lawrence called Sir Mark Sykes 'the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements'

The postwar order that the agreement sought to impose cut across both tribal and religious lines. This is something that the so-called Islamic State recognised when they called the agreement “a symbol of the fragmentation imposed upon Muslims”. Their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, acquired much kudos – and the title “breaker of barriers” – when his gunmen were filmed ploughing up the Sykes-Picot line between Syria and Iraq. These tribal and religious lines are something that Sykes should have recognised.

At first glance, Sir Mark Sykes seems the perfect fall guy. Over-privileged, nurtured in the heart of the establishment, personally appointed by Lord Kitchener, he was active at a time when his class still ruled half the world. But one thing this book does very well is to draw on Sykes’s private papers to provide a more complex and convincing portrait than the cartoon “toff” who struts across many histories of the period. The only son of an exceptionally wealthy Yorkshire landowner, Sykes grew up on the family’s 30,000-acre estate, with many servants and tutors, horses and hounds and a park laid out by Capability Brown, but also without much parental contact. His parents’ marital problems drove his flamboyant mother to take lovers and then, exiled to London, to take to gambling and the bottle.

His Cambridge years passed in a sequence of missed tutorials and hosted parties. When he arrived, one of his tutors noted that his “education had been neglected”, and before he left another tutor commented that he was unable to apply himself to things that did not interest him. Yet he acquired a reputation as someone who knew about the world, had travelled widely in the Middle East and could tell a good story.

After serving in the Boer war, he spent the years between his return, aged 23, and the outbreak of the first world war in intense activity. He wrote books, including accounts of his travels in the Ottoman east, and satires drawing on military experiences. Family connections helped him to diplomatic appointments in Ireland and Constantinople. He was elected to parliament, on the third attempt, where he spoke well and with passion about subjects he understood. He was also an antisemite, something the author brushes off as typical of “a man of his time and class”, although his Cambridge professor was surprised by the vehemence of his feelings.

When war broke out, Sykes was the commanding officer of a battalion of reservists, but instead of serving in France with his men he attracted the attention of Churchill and Kitchener and, in April 1915, was appointed to the British commission looking into the likely consequences of the fall of the Ottoman empire.

TE Lawrence, who met Sykes in the Middle East, called him “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements”, a man who carried “a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences”, who “would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it”. The civil commissioner for Basra (now in Iraq) thought Sykes had “a genius for happy but not always accurate generalisations”. That sort of view is obscured in this book. A year after the first government commission, Sykes was sent to conduct negotiations with the French, which is how his name was given to the catastrophic treaty.

In 1918, US president Woodrow Wilson said that Arabs should be given “an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development” and even Sykes accepted that the agreement’s wording should be changed. On the day the war ended, General Allenby, in command of allied forces in the Middle East, described Sykes as “a good fellow, but cracked, and his blessed Sykes-Picot Agreement must be torn up somehow”. Sykes died three months later in a Paris hotel, aged 39, of the Spanish flu. The great tragedy of his life, as this book suggests, was that his agreement survived him: had he lived longer, he might have fought against it.

Christopher Simon Sykes shows his grandfather in a clearer light, damaged by parents, bubbling with enthusiasm, deeply in love with his wife, an entertaining father at home, an amusing observer of people in the world – the book is lightened by many of his character sketches. But there are not enough other voices to make this a rounded portrait, and by the end of the book the title seems almost justified: Sir Mark Sykes did not create the modern Middle East, but he did play a large, bumbling part in creating the circumstances in which injustices have festered and conflict has thrived. Just before he died, he laid out his postwar vision of a world without secret diplomacy, but with “justice, reparation and security”. These are things that people in the Middle East have been fighting for ever since he drew his lines across their part of the world.

Anthony Sattin’s latest book is Young Lawrence (John Murray).

The Man Who Created the Middle East is published by Willam Collins (£25). Click here to buy it for £20.50