The Priest and the King

Download or read book The Priest and the King written by Desmond Harney and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 1997-12-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.