Inquirer: Fred Halliday as a young man. Alex Halliday
“What does he think of this? What does he think of this now?” Jean-Paul Sartre, reading the newspapers in the weeks after a car crash killed his estranged friend Albert Camus, put well the impact of a singular kind of intellectual bereavement. Many who knew Fred Halliday, the analyst of international affairs, must in their own way have echoed the thought after his death in Barcelona in April 2010 – and perhaps continue to do so.
As events unfolded in the Middle East, an element of synchrony came to sharpen the loss. Halliday was an extraordinary public intellectual. His work of four decades covered many fields, as the titles of his twenty books indicate: among them are Arabia Without Sultans, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, The Ethiopian Revolution (co-authored with Maxine Molyneux), The Making of the Second Cold War, Revolution and World Politics, and Two Hours that Shook the World.
