Peter Mansfield (historian)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Mansfield was born in 1928 in Ranchi, India, and was educated at Winchester and Cambridge. In 1955 he joined the British Foreign Office and went to Lebanon to study Arabic at the Middle Wast Centre for Arabic Studies. In November 1956 he resigned from the foreign service over the Suez affair, but remained in Beirut working as a political and economic journalist. He edited the Middle East Forum and corresponded regularly for the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, the Indian Express and other newspapers. From 1961 to 1967 he was the Middle East correspondent of the Sunday Times, based mainly in Cairo. After 1967 he lived in London, but made regular visits to the Middle East and North Africa, and in the winter of 1971-2 he was visiting lecturer on Middle East politics at Willamette University, Oregon. As editor his books include The Middle East: A Polyical and Economic Survey and Who's Who of the Arab World. He has also written Nasser's Egypt, Nasser: A Biography, The British in Egypt, Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf and The Arabs, a comprehensive study generally believed to be his magnum opus.

Mansfield died in March 1996, and his obituary in The Times he was praised as "eloquent, scholarly, free from convention...[He] earned himself a distinguished place by forty years of thoughtful work and the passion of his convictions."