Revolutionary Iran A History of the Islamic Republic Second Edition

"The best available single-volume introduction to Iran's history."―New Statesman

"If you were to read only one book on present-day Iran you could not do better than this." —Times Higher Education

A new edition of the definitive history of revolutionary Iran, essential for understanding the country today

For some 40 years the Islamic Republic has resisted widespread condemnation, sanctions, and sustained attacks by Iraq in an eight-year war. Many policy-makers today share a weary wish that Iran would somehow just disappear as a problem. But with Iran's continuing commitment to a nuclear program and its reputation as a trouble-maker in Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere, this is unlikely any time soon. An unending stream of assertions about the revolution's finally running down continue to be defied by events, and Iran's institutions are still formidable.

This is the definitive history of this subject, from one of the world's principal experts.

Michael Axworthy is the author of The Sword of Persia and Iran: Empire of the Mind, which established him as one of the world's principal experts on the country. He was head of the Iran Section of the British Foreign Office from 1998-2000 and senior lecturer and Director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Exeter. He died in 2019.