Robert Fisk was one of a few journalists who could rightly be described as a legend in his lifetime. Anyone with a passing interest in the Middle East over the past fifty years will certainly know his name and will probably have come across some of his reporting. Serious students of the region will have read his books. British-born, Fisk was mostly based in Beirut from 1976 until his death in 2020, during which time he covered all the wars – and horrors – of the greater Middle East. What he witnessed infuriated him; seething anger permeated his writing.

Fisk reported for The Times until 1987 and thereafter for The Independent. He turned much of this reporting into books. These included his classic description of the Lebanese civil war, Pity the Nation (1990), and his mammoth 1,366-page account of the region’s other modern conflicts, The Great War for Civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East. The latter took the narrative to 2005. Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East, effectively a sequel to that tome, takes the narrative a further fifteen years. It was unfinished at his death, but his second wife, Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, spent four years completing it from his notes, adding a valuable postscript setting out his final thoughts.