The Struggle for Syria, 1965から始まったシールの著作家としてのキャリアは、レバノン建国の父リヤード・アッ=スルフの評伝、The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East, 2010まで続いた。2011年以来のシリア内戦に際しても、イギリスや国際的なメディアに姿を現して解説することも多かった。亡くなったと聞いてちょっと驚いた。
Seale was born in Belfast in May 1930 but spent the first 15 years of his life in Syria, where his father Morris was a Christian missionary. He became irredeemably fascinated by the Levant.
Born in Belfast, Patrick was the son of Reine Attal, a midwife of Tunisian-Italian origin, and the Arabist and biblical scholar Morris Seale. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Syria, where for 20 years they ran the Irish Presbyterian mission. Patrick grew up between the Old City of Damascus and the mountain village of Bloudan, places and people in a landscape that would forever entrance him during the final years of Syria's deeply resented French Mandate rule.
In the early 1960s, he worked in Beirut as a freelance contributor to the Economist and the Observer. That paper's Middle East correspondent, based in the city, was Seale's friend Kim Philby, the British agent shared by MI6 and the KGB. Seale's break came in 1963 when Philby fled to Moscow. Seale was awarded the Observer posting, though did not use it as cover for being an MI6 operative.
He was educated at the French lycee in Damascus and at Monkton Combe school, near Bath, a haven for sons of the clergy. After a national service commission, part of which he spent in a tent in the Suez Canal Zone and most of the rest in the Intelligence Corps, Seale studied philosophy and psychology at Balliol College, Oxford (1950-53).
At the end of the decade he returned to Oxford to pursue Middle East studies at St Antony's College.
大学院で、中東など国際関係に強いセント・アントニーズ・カレッジでも学んでいます。
ここまでは基礎編。
上級編は?
よく知られた「あのこと」はどこに書いてあるんだろう。
「あのこと」というのは、奥さんと娘さんのこと。
オブザーバーの末尾には簡潔にこのように。
He married twice: Lamorna Heath in 1971, who died in 1978, mother of Orlando and Delilah; and Rana Kabbani, from whom he was separated, mother of Alexander and Jasmine.
ガーディアンでは、より詳しく、 Seale married Lamorna Heath in 1971; she died in 1978. Seven years later, he married Rana Kabbani; they eventually separated. She survives him, as do their children Alexander and Yasmine, and Orlando and Delilah, the children of his first marriage.
In 1971 Patrick Seale married Lamorna Heath, who died by her own hand seven years later after producing a son and a daughter. It turned out that the daughter, Delilah, was actually fathered by the novelist Martin Amis. Seale told Delilah (and Amis) the truth when she was 18.
Her own family narrative has been rather more complex. When Delilah was two, and her brother, Orlando, three, their mother, Lamorna Heath, hanged herself. Heath, a writer, had had depression for many years. Her husband, the writer Patrick Seale, was left to bring up the two children alone, which he did, in spite of having learned, a few months after Delilah's birth, that he was not her father. During a short period when he and Heath were separated, Heath had had an affair with the novelist Martin Amis, and Delilah was the result.
Amis knew about her. As he wrote in his autobiography, Experience, Heath had told him and had given him a photograph. "It showed a two-year-old girl in a dark flower dress, smocked at the chest, with short puffed sleeves and pink trim. She had fine blond hair. Her smile was demure: pleased, but quietly pleased."
Delilah Seale Learned Amis was her father on the night of her A-level results when journalist Patrick Seale, who had brought her up, broke the news over dinner. "I cried and cried," she wrote. Met Amis a year later after exchanging letters in which he told how he had decided not to be part of her life. Now a 33-year-old television producer living in west London.
In 2007, he revealed that it was Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who made him the man he is today and he credited her with transforming him into a literary Mick Jagger. The romance began when he was 23 and she was a 19-year-old undergraduate at St Anne's College, Oxford. "She was and is adorable," he said. Amis was the son of Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis and had graduated with a First in English from Exeter College, Oxford. After Brown, he went on to squire some of the most eligible women of his generation.
In 1985 he married Rana Kabbani, a Syrian from whom he was later separated. He is survived by his second wife and by four children, two from each marriage.