David Holden (journalist)

David Holden (born November 20, 1924 in Sunderland (Tyne and Wear) , England , † December 7, 1977 in Cairo , Egypt ) was a British journalist and author .

Life

After attending the Great Ayton Friend's School in northern Yorkshire , Holden studied at Emmanuel College in Cambridge and at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois) in the USA . He was then a school teacher in Scotland for three years , worked as an actor and went back to the USA. There he got by with odd jobs until he found employment as an assistant correspondent in Washington, DC in 1955 for the London newspaper The Times . In 1956 the newspaper sent him to the Middle East to report on the political and diplomatic developments after the Suez Crisis caused by the invasion of Egypt by British, French and Israeli troops.

For the next four years, Holden traveled to the Arab countries as the Times' Middle East correspondent and then became a freelancer. He joined The Guardian in 1961 as a foreign correspondent and in 1965 became senior foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Times . In the following years he wrote the books Farewell to Arabia (1966) and Greece Without Columns (1972) and began work on a third book, The House of Saud . He was murdered in Cairo on December 7, 1977, but the book was finished by the Middle East specialists of the Financial Times , Richard Johns and James Buchan, and published in London in 1981.

There are various theories about the motives for Holden's murder, none of which have been found to be clearly correct to date. Richard Johns considers at least, as he writes in the introduction to The House of Saud , a connection to the research for this book to be excluded. Ismail Fahmi , who resigned as Egyptian Foreign Minister on November 17, 1977, describes the events firsthand as an eyewitness in his 1983 book Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East .

Fonts

• 1966: Farewell to Arabia . Walker, New York City 1966.
• 1972: Greece Without Columns. The Making of the Modern Greeks . Lippincott, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA 1972, ISBN 0-397007795 .
• 1981: with Richard Johns and James Buchan: The House of Saud. The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World . Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1981.
  • as paperback: Pan Books, London 1982, ISBN 0-330-26834-1 .
  • German by Brigitte Stein: The dynasty of the Sauds. Desert warriors and world financiers . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-430-14767-0 .

literature

• Peter & Eddy, Paul Gillman: Labyrinth: The Murder of David Holden . Hutchinson, London 1981, ISBN 0-091742277 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Saud dynasty. Desert warrior and world financier , German by Brigitte Stein. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-430-14767-0 , p. 9f.