Sixty years ago, to echo Professor Colin Pritchard (My part in a war crime in Suez, Letters, 2 November), I was in the first term of my O-level year at a London grammar school, too young for national service though I had been eager to join the Royal Navy. Our form master required all boys to write a news diary to encourage us to think critically about current affairs. My then best friend and I set to, his family Daily Mirror readers, mine the Express, while my nonconformist history master encouraged us to read the Manchester Guardian. By the start of the autumn term, when we schoolboy diarists began our chronicle, British and French armed forces were deployed in the eastern Mediterranean to “take back control” (in the vernacular) of the Suez canal from the Egyptians after its nationalisation. But it would be half-term before the Israelis launched their attack across the Sinai against Egypt and the Anglo-French forces played their part in the tripartite plot by bombing the canal zone. The duplicity of British and French governments in calling for the disengagement of the Egyptian-Israeli forces was patent, even to 15-year-olds in Marylebone – yet to learn of the centuries of efforts by western powers to control the Middle East. It would take perhaps a decade for one of the schoolboy chroniclers to realise the duplicity of the United States in its Suez policy, just one of the stages in the long history of American intervention in the Middle East – an area then officially defined as stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.

Professor Michael Dunne

Brighton

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