The Emergence Of Libya: Selected Historical Essays

• Why, in about 1860, Britain lost its earlier enthusiasm for Tripoli and the Sahara as a ‘Gateway to Africa’
• What made the Zionist movement drop plans to settle one million East European Jews in Cyrenaica
• Why Mussolini accepted the ‘Sword of Islam’ in Tripoli in 1937
• The first welfare issue to preoccupy the British Eighth Army as it captured Tripoli in January 1943
• Why Libya had such an easy passage to independence in 1951>
• How, as a young leader, Moammar Gadafi was publicly ridiculed and put down by an Arab leader nearly old enough to be his grandfather who claimed Libyans were still living in the days of Adam and Eve.

These are just some of the issues John Wright discusses in these 20 chapters, here usefully collected under one cover from the many books and journals in which they first appeared. John Wright, was formerly the chief political commentator and analyst of the BBC Arabic Service, specialising in Libya, the Sahara and the international oil industry.