Table of Contents

Preface

1. An Eastern City
2. The Tower of Silence
3. In Praise of Gardens
4. The King of Merchants
5. The Imam Hussein
6. The Shadow of Death
7. Dwellers in Tents
8. Three Noble Ladies
9. The Treasure of the King
10. Sheikh Hassan
11. A Persian Host
12. A Stage and a Half
13. A Bridle- Path
14. Two Palaces
15. The Month of Fasting
16. Requiescant in Pace
17. The City of King Prusias
18. Shops and Shopkeepers
19. A Murray of the First Century
20. Travelling Companions

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A fascinating account of a lifetime of travel and a lifelong enchantment of Persia.

About the Author

Gertrude Bell, CBE (1868 - 1926) was a writer, traveller, political officer, archaeologist and spy who travelled extensively throughout Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and Arabia. Along with T. E. Lawrence, Bell helped establish the Hashemite dynasties in what is today Jordan and Iraq. She played a major role in the birth of the modern state of Iraq, using the perspective gained from her travels and relations with tribal leaders in the Middle East. She shunned convention by eschewing marriage and family for an academic career and the extensive travelling that would lead to her major role in Middle Eastern diplomacy.

But her private life was marred by the tragedy, vulnerability and frustration that were key to her quest both for a British-dominated Middle East and relief from the torture of her romantic failures. Through her vivid writings, she brought the Arab world alive for countless people as she travelled to some of the region’s most inhospitable places.

Reviews

In British diplomatic group photographs of the early twentiethcentury Middle East, amid the plumes and uniforms and the calm paraphernalia of an empire going to hell in a bucket, there is often a solitary female. The woman is slim, with a head of luxuriant hair, and neatly dressed in billowing muslins or in the pencil silhouette and cloche hats of jazz-age Baghdad. The woman is Gertrude Bell.
*The Guardian*

Her remarkable intellectual abilities and masculine demeanour make Persian Pictures, her first publication on an Eastern subject, all the more interesting.
*Geoffrey Nash*