By far the best sections of Coughlin’s book are the chapters on the revolution itself (a gift to a narrative historian, with its twists and turns, its massacres and conspiracies) and on the war with Iraq that followed immediately afterwards, a horrific replay of the First World War’s trench conflicts that mobilised the nation behind the new regime and turned Khomeini into a patriotic war leader. In the later chapters, by contrast, some of the nuance is lost and an intelligent book threatens to degenerate into a strident op-ed piece.
