Big Think Interview with Robert Lacey | Big Think

Big Think Interview with Robert Lacey

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A conversation with the author of “Inside the Kingdom”.

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Robert Lacey:

Robert Lacey is a British historian noted for his original research, which gets him close to - and often living alongside - his subjects. He is the author of numerous international bestsellers as well as the new release "Inside the Kingdom".

After writing his first works of historical biography, Robert, Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert wrote Majesty, his pioneering biography of Queen Elizabeth II. Published in 1977, Majesty remains acknowledged as the definitive study of British monarchy - a subject on which the author continues to write and lecture around the world, appearing regularly on ABC's Good Morning America and on CNN's Larry King Live.

The Kingdom, a study of Saudi Arabia published in 1981, is similarly acknowledged as required reading for businessmen, diplomats and students all over the world. To research The Kingdom, Robert and his wife Sandi took their family to live for eighteen months beside the Red Sea in Jeddah. Going out into the desert, this was when Robert earned his title as the "method actor" of contemporary biographers.

In March 1984 Robert Lacey took his family to live in Detroit, Michigan, to write Ford: the Men and the Machine, a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic which formed the basis for the TV mini-series of the same title, starring Cliff Robertson.

Robert's other books include biographies of the gangster Meyer Lansky, Princess Grace of Monaco and a study of Sotheby's auction house. He co- authored The Year 1000 - An Englishman's World, a description of life at the turn of the last millennium. In 2002, the Golden Jubilee Year of Queen Elizabeth II, he published Royal (Monarch in America), hailed by Andrew Roberts in London's Sunday Telegraph as "compulsively readable", and by Martin Amis in The New Yorker as "definitive".

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What distinguishes Saudi Arabia from other Middle Eastern countries?

Robert Lacey: Saudi Arabia is unique in the whole world in that A, it has the largest reserve of oil in the world, which gives [it], you can imagine, enormous power, and B, it contains the holy places of Islam, the cities of Mecca and Medina that every Muslim, 1.8 billion Muslims are supposed to visit those shrines in the course of their lifetime. These are on either side of the Arabian continent and in the middle you have Riyadh and the House of Saud, the princely family, which controls both these sources of economic power and religious power with their own very puritanical interpretation of Islam. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that is named after its ruling family. When I first went there it thought Saudi Arabia meant southern Arabia—[but] no, it means Arabia as conquered, ruled, pulled together by the House of Saud. Six, seven thousand princes and as many princesses of course, but we don’t see so much of them.

Question: How has King Abdullah affected Middle Eastern culture?

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