Elie Kedourie In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914–1939.
Frank Cass, 350 pages, $28.50 paper

This book was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1976. It was immediately hailed as a model of historical scholarship and remains the most careful and judicious study ever written of the genesis of Britain’s troubled relations with the Arabs. Drawing on the evidence contained in recently released archives from the Foreign Office, Kedourie was able to refine the indictment of the failures of British policy in the Middle East he had already put forward in such works as England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921 (1956) and The Chatham House Version and Other Essays (1970).

The Labyrinth has two parts. The first, called “The Quicksand,” borrows its title from a minute in which the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, gave vent to his exasperation over the hornet’s nest of conflicting pledges: “This Arab question is a regular quicksand.” Kedourie explored in detail the character and extent of the commitments made by the British government to the Arabs in order to induce them to take up arms against the Turks during the First World War. The second part of the book is called “The Fly in the Fly Bottle,” after a celebrated passage in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Here Kedourie conducted a ruthless examination of the official historiography from the time of the frenzied deliberations generated by the peace negotiations at Versailles—when