Bible and Sword England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

"Latter-day history has been content to trace the origins of Britain's Palestine Mandate, based on and incorporating the Balfour Declaration, to the exigencies of the post-World War I period. Barbara Tuchman, in this her first book, originally published in 1956, shows the Declaration and the Mandate to be the almost inevitable product of causes that go much farther back--causes that include a long sequence of gradually evolving motives, religious as well as political. A steady British advance toward the heart of the Middle East had been a historical fact long before Lord Milner observed that it was required by "the imperious necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers," and even before Lord Peel, chairman of the most effective of seventeen Commissions of Inquiry, said of Palestine: "No other problem of our time is so deeply rooted in the past." The inveterate spiritual importance of the Holy Land to England goes back into the misty ages of legend, continues into the centuries of pilgrimages and of the Crusades, and is implicit in the omnipervasive influence of the book that Thomas Huxley called his country's national epic--the English Bible. This is a stirring piece of history, and Mrs. Tuchman tells it, with clarity and insight, in terms of its most vital incidents and personalities."--Dust jacket of reprint edition.