Iran is the only country in the world where people think that secretly, behind the charade, America is Britain’s poodle. The eponymous hero of the 1970s comic novel My Uncle Napoleon – which was turned into one of the most popular TV series ever shown on Iranian television – is affectionately parodied for this: whatever went wrong, Uncle Napoleon blamed the British. The reason lies in a historical period imprinted on the minds of generations of Iranians but long forgotten in the UK. Christopher de Bellaigue’s elegantly written account of the life of the nationalist Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, and the MI6/ CIA-led coup against him, not only tells the full story of what happened, but highlights the dangers of a foreign policy that ignores the perceptions of those with memories longer than our own.
