A History of the Middle East 4th Edition Review A brilliantly deft and well-informed guide ... Peter Mansfield compresses the whole tumultuous development of this vast region into 350 coherent, dispassionate and remarkably inclusive pages (The Times Educational Supplement) 				    	 					 About the Author Peter Mansfield was born in 1928 in India. In 1955 he joined the British Foreign Office and went to Lebanon to study Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. From 1961 to 1967 he was the Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Times. He became one of Britain's foremost experts on the Middle East. Peter Mansfield died in 1996.