Peter Mansfield (historian)
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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 Crisis 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]
