Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia

Robert Lacey

Viking, 2009 - History - 404 pages

Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: It sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world and yet its roiling disaffection produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, where wealthy princes and tycoons raise futuristic cities in the desert, and yet its powerful religious establishment would roll back its values fourteen hundred years to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. To fully understand our interdependent twenty-first-century world, we must understand Saudi Arabia.
With Inside the Kingdom, author Robert Lacey gives readers a remarkable portrait in full of this most enigmatic of lands. More than twenty years after moving to Saudi Arabia during the oil boom to write his groundbreaking epic The Kingdom, Lacey returned to live once again among the princes and the paupers, the clerics and the progressives. What he found was a society slowly recovering from the past. In this recounting, which takes us from the bloody seizure of Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1979 to the deepening of U.S.-Saudi relations during the Gulf War of 1991 to the fostering of a new generation of Islamic holy warriors led by Osama bin Laden, Lacey shows how Saudi Arabia came to the precipice at which it now stands, struggling to learn how not to be at war with itself.

About the author

Robert Lacey was born in Guilford, Surrey, England on January 3, 1944. He earned a B.A. in 1967, a diploma of education in 1967, and an M.A. in 1970, all from Selwyn College, Cambridge. Lacey began his writing career as a journalist, working for the Illustrated London News and later the Sunday Times magazine. While working for the latter, he also began writing biographies; his books about Robert, Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh led to a commission to write a history of Queen Elizabeth's reign, to be published during her silver jubilee. Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor became an international bestseller, and established Lacey's reputation as a biographer who treated his subjects accurately and fairly. Lacey is a thorough researcher who has often gone to great lengths to immerse himself in the background of the people he writes about. He moved to the Middle East and even learned Arabic while doing research for The Kingdom, a biography of Saudi Arabia's first ruler, Abdul Aziz Sa'ud. And when writing Ford: The Man and the Machine, about Henry Ford, he relocated to Michigan and worked for a time on the assembly line in an auto plant. He is also the author of Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life, The Queen of the North Atlantic, The Life and Times of Henry the VIII, God Bless Her!, and Princess, a pictorial biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. Robert Lacey married Alexandre Avrach, a graphic designer, in 1971. They have three children, Sasha, Scarlett, and Bruno.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia
• Author: Robert Lacey
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Viking, 2009
• ISBN: 0670021180, 9780670021185
• Length: 404 pages
• Subjects: History / Middle East / General; History / Social History