Peter Mansfield (historian)

Peter Mansfield (2 September 1928 – 9 March 1996) was a British political journalist.

Mansfield was born in Ranchi, India, in 1928, the son of an official in the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at Winchester College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was elected President of the Cambridge Union.

In 1955 he was recruited by the Foreign Office, and was posted to Lebanon to study Arabic. He resigned his position in the aftermath of the Suez affair the following year. Remaining in Beirut, he edited the Middle East Forum and wrote regularly for the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, the Indian Express and other newspapers. From 1961 to 1967 he was the Middle East correspondent of the Sunday Times.

His books as author or editor include The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia Who's Who of the Arab World, Nasser's Egypt, Nasser: A Biography, The British in Egypt, Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf and The Arabs, and A History of the Middle East.

A fourth edition of his History of the Middle East, edited by Nicolas Pelham, was published in 2013. A subsequent fifth edition was published in 2019.

Mansfield died in Warwick in 1996. His obituary in The Times praised him as "eloquent, scholarly, free from convention...[He] earned himself a distinguished place by forty years of thoughtful work and the passion of his convictions."