Extract from A Line in the Sand

The book and its author’s breezy self-assurance were both the fruit of an extraordinary upbringing. Sykes had been born into a dysfunctional landed Yorkshire family and made his first visit to the Middle East with his parents, the eccentric Sir Tatton and the alcoholic Lady Jessica, at the age of just eleven. Sir Tatton, obsessive about church architecture, the maintenance of his body at a constant temperature and milk pudding, was sixty-four; Lady Jessica, who was barely half his age, was having an affair with their tour guide. Mark Sykes was their only child.

The year was 1890. The Sykes family visited Egypt, which Britain had seized from the Ottomans eight years earlier, and then went on to Jerusalem and the Lebanon, still then in Turkish hands. For Sykes, the sense of travelling back in time was mesmerising. It was also a distraction from his parents’ unhappy marriage, which culminated in 1897 with a toe-curling court case that revealed their respective peccadilloes. During this period, Sykes escaped to the Middle East repeatedly, first as an undergraduate, then as a young honorary attaché at the British embassy in the Ottoman capital, Constantinople. Recounting how he had shot the lock off the door of an abandoned caravanserai so that he could stay there overnight, he gained a reputation as an intrepid, if rather free-spending, tourist. When he bumped into another traveller, Gertrude Bell, in Jerusalem and admitted what he had paid for horses, she made a mental note to arrange her journey ‘so as not to fall in with him, bless him, for if I know the East, prices will double all along his route’.

Like many travel writers, Sykes liked to pretend that he was going into unknown territory. He chose his routes, he claimed, by ‘following his nose over those portions of the map which were the whitest or most rich in notes of interrogation and dotted lines’. The sight of other Europeans spoiled the view. While Bell, like many other contemporaries, found Sykes ‘most amusing’, Sykes was much less pleased to come across Miss Bell. ‘Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globetrotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass,’ he ranted to his wife.

The Ottoman Empire was by then ‘going downhill’, as Sykes had put it in that first parliamentary speech. After the sultan’s government went bankrupt in 1876 the British government abandoned a fifty-year-old policy of supporting the Ottomans’ integrity and independence as a bulwark against other powers’ ambitions. In 1878 Britain seized Cyprus and, four years later, Egypt and the Suez Canal in order to secure the route to India. As the canal turned into the major artery for Britain’s growing eastern commerce, Egypt became the fulcrum of the British Empire.