Nicolas Pelham has written about the Middle East since 1992. He began as the editor of Middle East Times from Cairo before joining the BBC Arabic Service. He covered the Algerian civil war and the caprice of Colonel Qaddafi as the BBC's correspondent in Rabat. In 2002 he joined the Financial Times reporting on the downfall of first Saddam Hussein and then the American protectorate in Baghdad. Since 2010, he has reported on the region's collapse for The Economist and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of two previous books, A New Muslim Order (2008) on Arab Shiite rule, and A History of the Middle East (2010) with Peter Mansfield. He lives in London with his wife and three children.