The Priest and the King: An Eyewitness Account of the Iranian Revolution

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Description

The author, a former British diplomat, was living in Tehran during the build-up to the Iranian Revolution and kept a day-to-day account of the events he witnessed, as the priest and the king - the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shah - squared up to each other. The author's faithfully recorded responses - of hope, fear, confusion, scepticism and ultimately despair - reflect with substantial accuracy the spirit in Iran as the country swung from being a docile, Western-orientated ally to an unpredictable, brooding, revolutionary state. Harney had access to all elements of Iran's political elite, including the Shah, and was able to capture the atmsophere of Iran in revolution. This diary is, therefore, an important document: a day-to-day account kept by an outsider who was intimately familiar with Iran, a crucial contribution to our historical understanding of events.

Reviews

"Captures with a wonderful sense of immediacy the excitement and bewilderment of those days." --Gary Sick, editor, The Persian Gulf in the New Millennium

"[An] extraordinary and riveting diary of events that led to the Shah's overthrow...Harney conveys superbly the ups and downs, the rumours and speculations, the paranoia...as the old order was undermined." --William Shawcross, The Sunday Times (London)

Author Bio

Desmond Harney lived for more than a decade in Iran, both as a senior British diplomat and as a banker. He currently lives in London.