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Title: gossip and old chestnuts as history
Review: This is an example of " oriental" history writing : using old chestnuts and gossip curerent in Tehran's aristocratic circles as history. The issue of the rivalry between the British and Russian empires in Iran, and the threat that they both posed to Iran's very survival as an independent nation-state is left aside in favour of anecdotes and innuendos. The only way to enjoy this book is to forget that its subject is history and to read it as a collection of little tales circulating in the Iranian capital in the forties and fifties. The author, assuming a nationalist pose, repeats, parrot-like, the rumours spread by the British and their agents as part of a strategy to drag the Iranian leadership in mud and thus promote the myth of their own invincibility. A reader in Lodnon
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