How the New Middle East Was Made with Simon Sebag Montefiore

About this episode

Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with one of the foremost historians of our time, Simon Sebag Montefiore. As I write this, his work has never felt more urgent. “We’re in a new world of counterhistory,” he said recently. “A new world of counterhistory where neither historical facts nor present-time facts matter if they don’t fit the ideological orthodoxy.” It is “our responsibility as historians,” he said, “to stand up and be unafraid to contradict conventional wisdom, surging conspiracies, witch hunts, purity tests, pile-ons that are used to crush debate . . . and to say persuasively, ‘This is what happened.’ ” And that is what he does in his brilliant new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. But don’t worry. This is Sebag. I promise you this is not some serious, dry textbook. There is a chapter in his book called “Fat Fucker” (which was the CIA’s code name for King Farouk of Egypt). You will learn in his pages that a Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist was married to a Miss Universe. That Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and President John F. Kennedy were both johns at Madame Claude’s Parisian brothel. And that Saddam Hussein was raised by a