PHILBY, Harry St John Bridger.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Arabian Days. First edition, inscribed by the author on the front pastedown, "For Phyllis Greene, with the author's good wishes and affection. H. S. J. B. Philby. 20/7/52." This work tells "the remarkable story of Philby's transformation from an official of the Indian Civil Service into an anti-imperialist, converted Muslim, confidant and agent of Ibn Saud" (Foreign Affairs, October 1949).After his imprisonment in Britain during the Second World War, Philby returned to his a familiar life in Arabia in 1945 and embarked on an intensive period of literary productivity to secure his legacy in print. Arabian Days was finished in August 1945 in Riyadh, at a time when Philby was looking forward to the "light of freedom" dawning on the Arab world (p. 330). In 1952, amid the fallout from the Cambridge Five scandal, he published Arabian Highlands and Arabian Jubilee. "Few would quarrel with the inscription on [Philby's] tombstone: 'Greatest of Arabian explorers'. And in the central judgements of his life - that Ibn Saud was the man to back in Arabia and that the Arabs had to have their independence - he was right and almost everyone else was wrong" (ODNB).

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