Name: Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences
Rating: 3.63 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780198201410

3,287 reviews117 followers

July 25, 2026

one of these unbearable 'multinational perspectives'
where the editors feel they are immune from a narrative bias of a single author

or even worse when they hint that we are free from a 'Eurocentric bias'.

Suez has already been intensely researched for decades by British writers of high caliber, and only the rare anti-Eden or anti-Suez book has offered a depth of perspective.

One of the best ones was Richard Lamb's book in 1987

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"The Failure of the Eden Government is a 1987 historical biography and political study written by British historian Richard Lamb."

"The book analyzes the premiership of Sir Anthony Eden from 1955 to 1957. Relying heavily on the Public Record Office archives (which were opened in 1986), Lamb's primary goal was to dissect why Eden's time as Prime Minister is widely considered a failure."

"The book heavily details Eden's catastrophic handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis, which ultimately led to his downfall. Lamb explores the diplomatic blunders and the severe economic and political fallout from the botched military intervention in Egypt."

"The book critiques the economic policies of the Eden administration, pointing out their inability to curb inflation or solve underlying structural problems in the post-war British economy."

" Lamb argues that Eden's obsession with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and his failure to integrate Britain into early European economic talks (like the 1955 Messina Conference) alienated Britain from the rest of Western Europe."

"While Lamb's book highlights the extensive political and diplomatic disasters of the era, it also attempts to contextualize Eden's failures by examining the immense pressure he was under from both the United States and the Commonwealth, shedding a nuanced light on his overall time in office."

Not a book I would fully agree with, but I haven't seen any critical works since that have really added anything substantial to the conversation.

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At the other end is Thorpe's book

"Thorpe’s Anthony Eden is more than a biography; it’s a study in leadership, character, and the limits of power. It reminds readers that political failure is rarely the result of one man’s weakness, but often the product of history itself closing in. Thorpe restores Eden’s reputation as a man of intelligence, integrity, and good intentions. One whose story is as tragic as it is instructive."

"I found that one of the central themes of Anthony Eden is the moral dimension of leadership. From his earliest days in politics, Eden prided himself on being a man of principle. He resigned from Neville Chamberlain’s government over the policy of appeasement in 1938, a bold move that earned him public admiration and positioned him as the ‘golden boy’ of British politics. Thorpe uses this moment to highlight Eden’s lifelong belief that foreign policy should be guided by ethics as much as strategy, an attitude that often brought him into conflict with the pragmatic realities of diplomacy."

"Thorpe is balanced, humane, and quietly sympathetic throughout this book. He doesn’t shy away from Eden’s flaws, such as the vanity, the irritability, the misjudgments, but he presents them within the context of a man under immense strain. This is not a hatchet job, nor is it a whitewash."

chalk up two books, which shows that excellent narrative bias can produce in-depth work, though Lamb's bias is extreme.

There's also the geopolitical angle, and how most problems, may not have a solution, or at least a choice of many difficult options.

"Anthony Eden’s government (1955–1957) is historically remembered for its tragic and premature end, which was largely dictated by the disastrous 1956 Suez Crisis."

"Historians and biographers often point out that this specific era was marred by a combination of impossible geopolitical pressures, the withdrawal of American support, and Eden's severe, chronic health issues."

"Rather than simply labeling his premiership an outright failure, Thorpe’s biography used newly released government records to argue that Eden’s tenure was a series of compounding personal and political bad breaks, successfully rehabilitating his reputation"

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And there's extremely little of merit when you're dealing with the Egyptian perspective (like Mohammad Heykal) or the Canadian pro-Pearson angle, or a few pro-Dulles (Allan and John Foster) books that really say little more than Eisenhower didn't need a problem beforean election with his 87-heart attacks a week, which would make make him look weak, as well as CIA objectives on petroleum and Energy concerns with the Arab world, and British Diplomatic and Intelligence tentacles that clashed with Allan Dulles.

You get more insight from Eden's own memoirs from 1960, along with any 1980s and beyond biographies on Eden, than many of these books of shallow document sniffers

and the the whole woke multi-cult aspects of the past 35 years adds to the inability to write history well, where agendas matter more than depth.

You know the old line, A Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare says more about Marx than it does about Shakespeare, and the same goes for all the other -isms in the Arts, and history books

I just think that with the 1980s excellent books on Eden and Suez came out for a good twenty years, and then things started to regress again like so many of the shallow books of the 60s and 70s

One of the trouble with historians is they seem to place too much emphasis on great historian figures and policy failures.

Yet in England you had people saying Suez was a watershed moment, as well as others who said it was not. Actually the topping of Iran by the British with American help was a much more pivotal moment, and well, you know how it goes... things that fall apart slowly are judged much different than things that fall apart quickly.

When they do those odd polls where famous historians rank American and English leaders for the greatest, and the biggest failures.

You'll get Roosevelt and Churchill up there with the big win
and you'll get LBJ and Eden there with the failures of Vietnam and Suez

How would Churchill fared if he was dealing with the Middle East into the 50s and 60s?
Or Kennedy with Vietnam?

There is a lot of luck with leaders with ability, as well as geopolitical situations with no solution, or no good options.

Eden faced a nightmare risk if the Israelis were going to have a full out war in 1956. The Mediterreanan was the weakest point for mid 1950s Britian if there were a crisis, and some of that entangles with Churchill (with Eden) only a few years before pulling out troops from the Suez Canal Zone. (Similar happenned with Iraq when the british pulled out, and Baghdad wanted to invade Kuwait, and the British had to park a battleship offshore)

Jordan was a British protectorate, and the nightmare situation was where British would need to invade Jordan, Israel and Egypt at the same time. And the other superpowers would probably choke an ice cube on that one.

Eden wasn't liked a lot in Israel, dismissed as a pro-Arab Orientalist and British Imperialist, with his Oxford double major in Persian and Arabic. Yet, Eden was a lot more appreciated in Israel after the 1967 and 1973 wars though, guess they realized the Nasser problem, over the long-term. Just like people noticing the Panama Canal with Noriega was an eerie dilemma just like Suez, when some dictator wants their thumb on your windpipe. Just like Iran having that situation as we speak.

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People tend to be amused with Eden, speaking three weeks at Ian Flemings Goldeneye for recuperation, right after the Suez Criss unrolled

The National Interest
Spectre of Defeat: James Bond and the Decline of Britain and America
November 2015

The Suez Crisis in the fall of 1956 broke British prime minister Anthony Eden. It was the clearest sign yet that the empire’s time in the sun had come and gone. Decline that began during the Boer War of 1899-1902, perhaps earlier, had a steep, sudden drop that autumn under Eden’s watch. Exhausted, the prime minister retreated from London to one of the United Kingdom’s remaining outposts, the Caribbean island of Jamaica, and to the vacation home of a World War II naval commander. The house itself was squat, with thick walls of crushed limestone. Sparsely furnished, it was more in the mode of a bunker than the opulent plantation style that, by then, was nobly decaying elsewhere on the island. There, on Jamaica’s northern coast, Eden swam and sunned. After several days he returned to London somewhat rested but, nonetheless, to an empire further diminished in power. He would resign his office within weeks.

The home’s owner was not there during Eden’s visit, but he had been there most years since 1946, indulging in a hobby he had adopted after the war. He wrote novels that his wife would dismiss as “pornography.” He was Ian Fleming and he wrote about the British spy James Bond, a character whose popularity was ascendant just as the British Empire’s power was going the other way.
Geopolitical danger in a foreign land, solace sought in a tropical paradise—it all too perfectly captures the anxieties and escapism that underwrite Fleming’s entire series. Of course, Britain and Bond are linked by more than by just Eden’s 1956 visit to Fleming’s home.

Enjoy

Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences

William Roger Louis (Editor), Roger Owen (Editor)

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William Roger Louis

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