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as prime minister six and thirteen years respectively, is one of the strongest features of his work. The anti-expansionist Liberal Gladstone opposed the Conservative Disraeli’s staunch imperialism. Yet, against his own principles, Gladstone oversaw the invasion (in 1882) and occupation of Egypt. Chapters eight and nine explain the contradiction in Gladstone’s policies and the aftermath of Britain’s war against the rebel nationalist Ahmed Urabi. Harrison notes with heavy irony that Gladstone, one-third of whose personal investments were in Egyptian bonds, had “rescued Egypt from the jaws of independence and remained to guarantee [its] ‘liberties’ for the next seventy-two years” (101). Harrison explains the effect of the First World War on Egyptian nationalists and the vast contradictions of British commitments, the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, the SykesPicot agreement, and the Balfour Declaration. He includes a few cogent sentences on the Hashemite-Saudi struggle, which reignited the old rivalry between the British and Indian governments. But brevity is both a virtue and principal shortcoming of this book. Harrison devotes only 67 pages to the years 1918–1971, rushing the reader through the critical decades of Britain’s demise as a Middle Eastern power in a less careful account that is prone to inaccuracies. Thus, Haj Amin Husseini, “an outspoken enemy of Zionism and the British,” did not simply “assume a position of power” (163). Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner in Palestine, appointed Haj Amin both grand mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Moshe Dayan was never commander of the Haganah (176). Harrison accords Miles Lampson (172–78), ambassador to Egypt and high commissioner of the Sudan, disproportionate attention. Unfortunate errors and stylistic tics mar both the text and notes. A few examples are Hussein as “sheriff ” of Mecca (132) but his son Feisal “sherif ” (139), and “British Social Forces” instead of “Special Forces” (250). There are also too many trite expressions, some of which appear repeatedly. Thus (again) in late 1947 “the exasperated British threw in the towel” (195). For Britain, Suez in 1956 was “1882 over again” (205). Ten years later, Aden was “Palestine all over again” (207). Harrison cites documents from the British archives but almost none after chapter eleven. The bibliography includes much of the relevant secondary literature, but there are anomalies; one of them is frequent reference to William Roger Louis’s The British Empire in the Middle East (1984) but no mention of his book Ends of British Imperialism (2006). In the later chapters Harrison relies heavily on classroom textbooks, including those by Charles Smith and Ian Bickerton and Carla Klausner on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Criticism of this work notwithstanding, Harrison is to be commended for making such an important subject highly accessible to students and scholars at all levels. His work is a welcome addition to the literature on both British history and the modern Middle East.