The Islamic Revolution of 1979, which toppled Iran's Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was one of the most significant political events of the past 50 years, said Charlie Gammell in the Financial Times .

It transformed Iran from a "hyper-rich, secular-leaning" kingdom "allied to the West" into the "dour, repressive Islamist autocracy we know today". And as well as reshaping the Middle East , it ultimately brought "politically motivated Islamist violence to all our streets".

How strange, then, that "no one in power saw it coming until it was too late": not the CIA , not US president Jimmy Carter (who in 1977 praised Iran as an "island of stability"), and certainly not the Shah himself. In this "brilliant" book, the war correspondent and novelist Scott Anderson tells the story of the Re

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