Description
Muscat and Oman: The End of an Era (1974)
FIRST EDITION. 8vo. (21.5 x 13.5 cm). pp.224. Publisher’s original red cloth, spine gilt-lettered, in the dust-jacket. Colour frontispiece and 16 b/w plates. Some minimal shelfwear, generally a very good copy. “Sultan Said bin Taimur worked hard to preserve his country from contact with the outside world, to prevent outsiders from seeing what was happening within its borders. He was remarkably successful. For years knowledge of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was blurred and indistinct, its image bedraggled, and the Sultan’s reputation was as a reactionary, if not feudal, ruler. Now things are different; there is a new Sultan, a new outlook, and even the country has been renamed the Sultanate of Oman. Anybody can go and see it for himself. Nobody, however, who was not there before 1970 can imagine what it was like in the days of Said bin Taimur. Ian Skeet was there. He travelled widely through the country, and the reality of the Sultan’s Muscat and Oman made a deep and lasting impression on him. In his book he paints a vivid portrait of the country and the way it was run against a background of its long and variegated history. It is a record, both sensitive and dispassionate, of a time and place that were unique, and which richly repay Ian Skeet’s descriptive insight. All Arabia is endlessly fascinating; and Muscat and Oman is a unique portrayal of what was, until very recently, perhaps its most intriguing and most mysterious corner”.
