The 1650 treaty agreement between Oman and Britain declared that the bond between the two nations should be "unshook to the end of time." It was an ambitious goal, but whatever the political ups and downs, a remarkable relationship endures to this day, charted here in this authoritative history by two former British Ambassadors to Oman. Laing and Alston, both former British Ambassadors to Oman, have researched their subject closely, assembling an authoritative history which runs from the earliest contacts in the mid-17th century through to the end of the Dhofar wars in 1975. Their research sheds new and clearly documented evidence on how events unfolded over the past fifty years. This landmark book will be vital to all historians of the region and to analysts of the current geopolitical situation in the Persian Gulf.

The first volume of stage and TV plays by one of the best British TV writers

Flint premiered just before the 1970 General Election which was to replace the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. It is driven by the figure of Ossian Flint, a seventy-year old swinging vicar who believes in "crossing lines not drawing them" and espouses the romanticised Communism of Lenin and Guevara; In the BBC play The Bankrupt, Ellis Cripper, a woman aged fifty has become bankrupt through operating at "the dishonourable end of the system...capitalism"; An Afternoon at the Festival centres around a version of middle-aged man Leo Brent who is an extreme egoist and a failure in his personal relationships; Duck Song was first produced in the dying days of the failing Heath government and the characters represent a society in decline as the younger characters attempt to find a solution through feminism or psychiatry, it presents "a world to which one cannot relate, which one cannot control, which one can't understand, and which one can't manipulate"; The Arcata Promise centres around the attraction betwen an actor and an inexperienced girl and the destructive conclusion of such an attraction; Find Me returns to the theme of ideological conflict and Eastern Europe; Huggy Bear, a Yorkshire Television production that depicts Hooper, an infantile and philosophical dentist with a "failure to integrate."