Voices Through Walls

In recent years it has been largely overlooked how one of the world's smallest but wealthiest nations, Qatar, has helped lift Britain out of double-dip recession and an early energy crisis. This handsomely repaid its one-time protector for preventing its own near slide into oblivion 70 years earlier. Against a wider portrait of Middle East energy development, convoluted workings and lost opportunities amid an earlier British and Ottoman presence, an absorbing story unfolds. It tells how many cultures and nationalities worked together to lead a people stricken by hunger and disease along a rags to riches road to a new life of previously unimaginable wealth. The author, who lived and worked in the Arabian Gulf region, relates this tale largely through the individuals who made the best of testing conditions during their contribution to the transformation - Westerners, Asians and Arabs themselves. This fascinating assembly of characters - oilfield and offshore workers, diplomats, doctors, nurses, gardeners, sheikhs, pearl divers, merchants and airmen recall, often in their own words, their experiences with humour and nostalgia. Eccentrics, risk-takers, pioneers, heroes, and just plain hard grafters - they were all there proving how, despite today's undercurrents of mistrust, individuals of diverse nationalities, faiths and backgrounds can work together where a will exists.