‘The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights’ J. PAUL GETTY (attrib.)

On 14 February 1945, US President Roosevelt and Ibn Saud met on a warship anchored in the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, agreeing in secret to a binding oil-for-security pact. Under the deal, the Saudi monarch guaranteed an uninterrupted supply of cheap oil for as long as it lasted in return for American hard cash, technology and military protection against any threats to the kingdom and its allies. For its part, the US would defend the cause of Arab sovereignty and get a free hand in the wider affairs of the Middle East. The US-Saudi special relationship would be strained to breaking point many times in the next eighty years, but the Valentine’s Day pact holds true to this day.

With novelistic verve, Digby Lidstone tells the story of the meeting, the oil bonanza in the eastern desert that followed and its many unforeseen consequences. It describes how the rapid influx of wealth transformed the landscape of Arabia and the lives of the people who lived there. And it explains how the covert US-Saudi pact not only underwrote the new world order that emerged from the ruins of the Second World War but also drew the faultlines of future conflicts.

From Ibn Saud, Churchill and Roosevelt to the British and American prospectors, diplomats and chancers seeking opportunity and oil in the Middle East, the story meets such characters as St John Philby, Muhammad bin Laden, Gertrude Bell and Francis Younghusband.

In a story that only ever seems more timely, this is a brilliant work of writing that introduces a new voice to non-fiction books.

Valentine’s Day 1945 is the sixth title in Old Street’s Great Events series – short, beautiful books on turning points in modern history.