The author is a leading Arab journalist, a former newspaper editor in Cairo, so his views and facts obviously demand to be taken seriously. Apparently, negotiations between Israel and the Arab world go back far beyond the much publicised Oslo talks of 1993 - which, in retrospect, is hardly surprising. A recurrent simplification in Western attitudes is to assume that the Arab, or even the Islamic, world is a monolith, whereas it has endless divisions, shades of opinion, and national or regional interests. Heikal does not stick to events of the past decade or so, he is revealing about previous statesmen such as Nasser and Sadat, both of whom he knew personally. For those who seek a better grasp of the labyrinthine politics and recent history of the Near and Middle East, this work should prove a convenient crotch.