A quarter of a century after he published his first book on Saudi Arabia, “The Kingdom”, Robert Lacey returned to the country to write a sequel. He stayed for almost three years and seems to have talked to virtually everyone—princes and commoners, businessmen and bloggers—spending hours drinking tiny cups of coffee in cushion-lined reception rooms. The second book is richer, more considered and more damning than the first.

Picking up pretty much where he left off, Mr Lacey concentrates on the past 30 years, during which the kingdom experienced the cumulative effects of a succession of crises. First came the annus horribilis of 1979. An Islamic revolution toppled the shah in next-door Iran, an armed group led by a zealot called Juhayman took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca to proclaim the advent of the Muslim messiah, and the Soviet bear blundered into Afghanistan—events that heralded or hastened the apparently unstoppable rise of worldwide Islamic militancy.

If the 1980s were turbulent, worse was to come. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 prompted the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, to invite half-a-million infidel (mainly American) troops onto his soil. It was not only Osama bin Laden who inveighed against the “crusader” armies, spreading “like locusts” through the holy land of Arabia. For Saudi Islamists, their arrival was akin to colonisation and it provoked a fierce, and eventually violent, backlash against the House of Saud. Mr bin Laden and his ilk were set on the road that led to the biggest crisis of all, that of September 11th 2001. Your reviewer knows of no book that captures so convincingly the intimate connection between the kingdom and the rise of al-Qaeda and its jihadist ideology. Indeed, Mr Lacey argues that without the Saudi role the September 11th attacks would have been inconceivable.

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