Ayatollah Khomeini

Around 350 pages into Simon Sebag Montefiore’s exhilarating and accomplished history of the modern Middle East, we reach the present – or at least times that are so close to us that they are very much part of our recent lived experience. We have, to be fair, left long ago the realm of archives and yellowing press cuttings, black-and-white photographs and oft-cited quotes, and have been traversing for some time the years of all-too-bloody recent memory: 9/11 and its consequences, the Iraq War, the rise of ‘neo-Ottoman’ Turkey, the Arab Spring and much else. But suddenly here we are.

Ben Macintyre has a knack of distilling impeccably sourced information about clandestine operations into clear, exciting narrative prose. His latest book, about the April 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London, starts as it means to go on – with a snapshot of seven Range Rovers, two Ford Transit vans and two furniture lorries pulling out of Bradbury Lines, the then headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS) in Hereford. Lying low inside were 45 soldiers and ‘enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war’. Each man carried a submachine gun, mostly the ‘reliably lethal’ Heckler & Koch MP5, which fires 13 rounds a second, with four 30-round magazines of 9x19mm parabellum bullets.