Peter Mansfield (historian)
Peter John Mansfield (2 September 1928 – 9 March 1996)[1] was a British political journalist and historian.
Mansfield was born in Ranchi, India, in 1928, the son of an official in the Indian Civil Service.[1] He was educated at Winchester College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was elected President of the Cambridge Union.[1]
In 1955, he was recruited by the Foreign Office, and was posted to Lebanon to study Arabic.[1] He resigned his position in the aftermath of the Suez affair the following year.[2] Remaining in Beirut, he edited the Middle East Forum and wrote regularly for the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, the Indian Express and other newspapers.[citation needed] From 1961 to 1967, he was the Middle East correspondent of the Sunday Times.
His books as author or editor include The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia[3] Who's Who of the Arab World, Nasser's Egypt, Nasser: A Biography, The British in Egypt, Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf and The Arabs, and A History of the Middle East.
A fourth edition of his History of the Middle East, edited by Nicolas Pelham, was published in 2013.[4] A subsequent fifth edition was published in 2019.
Mansfield died in Warwick in 1996. His obituary in The Times praised him as "eloquent, scholarly, free from convention...[He] earned himself a distinguished place by forty years of thoughtful work and the passion of his convictions."[5]
Works
[edit]- Mansfield, Peter (1969), Nasser's Egypt (Revised [i.e. 2nd] ed.), Penguin, retrieved 26 June 2016
- Mansfield, Peter (1971), The British in Egypt, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ISBN 978-0-297-00453-0
- Mansfield, Peter (1973), The Ottoman Empire and its successors, Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-333-07382-7
- Mansfield, Peter (1976), The Arab world : a comprehensive history, Crowell, ISBN 978-0-690-01170-8
- Mansfield, Peter (1981), The new Arabians (1st ed.), J.G. Ferguson Pub. Co. ; New York : Distributed by Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-17911-9
- Mansfield, Peter (1992), The Arabs (3rd ed.), Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-014768-1
- Mansfield, Peter (1992), A history of the Middle East (New ed.), Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-012538-2
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d Michael Adams writing in The Independent (13 March 1996). "Obituary: Peter Mansfield". Archived from the original on 24 April 2013.
- ^ The British Empire magazine, no 75, Time-Life Books, 1973
- ^ Mansfield, Peter (23 October 1992), "Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia: The Tragedy of Longevity", The Times Literary Supplement (n4673), Times Supplements Ltd: 26 (1), ISSN 0307-661X
- ^ Mansfield, Peter; Pelham, Nicolas (2013), A history of the Middle East (Fourth / revised and updated by Nicolas Pelham ed.), New York Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0-14-312190-9
- ^ Times, March 1996.
