FLAPTEKST :

the son of a self-made motor engineer who became an hereditary peer , and a Jewish girl form Latvia , Ivor Lucas pusued what was in the cirumstances an unlikely career as an Arabist in the British Dipliomatic Service

following a spell of military duty in the Middle East immediately after World War II , he spent 33 years as a diplomat , mostly in that region ; he served as Ambassador to Oman and to Syria , and after retirement in 1984 maintained his interest in Middle Eastern affairs in a commercial and then an acadeamic context

in A ROAD TH DAMASCUS he tells of what particularly interested and amused him about his work ; a seminal experience was the decline and fall of the Shah , which he watched from the vantage point as Head of the Middle East Department in the FCO from 1975 tot 1979 ; from this he drew a number of conclusions , such as the folly of the arms race in the Gulf , which were not always in accordance with the official policy ; he paints a picture of the diplomatic service from the point of view of a ´ toiler in the vineygards ´ which he believes is the reality of much diplomatic life today , as distinct from the glossy version so often portrayed in the media

the author´s account of the transformation which took place in the Arab and Muslim worlds in the second half of the 20th century is sympathetic without being sentimental ; it is enlivened by a range of official and personal anecdotes ; what emerges from these pages is a bureaucratic with a human face