This interesting and informative book is about the British Military Administration (BMA) of Cyrenaica from the Battle of El Alamein until the creation of an independent Libya under King Mohammed Idris al-Sanussi. The author's father, Peter Synge, was for five years a member of the BMA team. The diary he kept at the time and a memoir which he wrote in later life have been edited by the author/son and together they form the main content for the book.

Peter Synge was transferred from Libya in 1947, having risen from lowly Assistant Political Officer to the loftier rank of Political Secretary. Fortuitously, his successor in the latter position, Gervase Cassels, left his own well-written memoir, which covers the period just before the country's independence. These three texts together provide the fascinating and until now little-known inside story of the BMA's work. Richard Synge furnishes the overarching historical context, in the process lifting the veil on Britain's post-war political strategy for Libya. The Foreword is by Libyan specialist and Cambridge scholar Jason Pack.

Cyrenaica had been shattered by the war. The infrastructure built by the Italians in the 1920s and 1930s had collapsed. The task of the BMA was to take control and get the province functioning again. Communications were dire: main roads were unusable, bridges had been bombed, telegraph and telephone wires were down. In addition, the country was strewn with wreckage and weapons, the ports were full of sunken ships, and economic activity was at a standstill.

One of only 27 men to be recruited to the BMA at this stage, Synge and his colleagues were ‘thrown in at the deep end’, having to address a multitude of problems and improvise solutions. They organised food supplies, sat as magistrates, facilitated repairs, oversaw the collection of war equipment left lying about, and attempted to maintain public order. There was little recreation in the beginning apart from alcohol, interminable games of bridge, and the occasional rugby match.

While his men were thus running from one duty to another, the head of the BMA, Brigadier Duncan Cumming, was focused on British interests, namely bringing anglophile Sanussi leader Mohammed Idris back from exile in Egypt. The underlying purpose of this was to make Libya a client state of the British, perceived to be especially important since British influence in Egypt was on the wane. Synge was involved in arranging Idris's first visit to Cyrenaica since his departure two decades earlier. Taking place in the summer of 1944, the visit seemed to give the Cyrenaicans and the British more pleasure than it gave to Idris, who made numerous complaints about arrangements and seemed to long for his home back in Egypt. In one amusing episode, Idris was so cold (in August!) that he wanted to leave for Cairo immediately, a crisis only averted when Synge lent him some of his own winter clothes.

With the passage of time, the rise of Libyan nationalism began to complicate British plans. Inside Cyrenaica there was an increasing rift between Sanussi loyalists and an outspoken intellectual faction which was anti-colonial, and so anti-BMA. At the country level, there were the usual disagreements between Cyrenaicans and Tripolitanians. When Peter Synge finally left in October 1947, his last report told of a hardening attitude against the BMA ‘and a swing of feeling away from Great Britain’.

Idris returned to Cyrenaica permanently in November 1947. In 1949, as amir of the province, he unilaterally proclaimed its independence, the Foreign Office giving tacit approval. While there was, of course, no independence from the heavy influence of the FO itself, times were changing rapidly. The future of Libya was increasingly under discussion at the United Nations and it was under the auspices of the UN that ‘independent’ Cyrenaica was in 1951 merged into an ‘independent’ Libya, where British influence was still paramount.

At the end of the book, Gervase Cassels' memoir provides a fascinating account of the preparations for elections to the new Libyan Parliament, due to take place in February 1952. The Egyptian government under King Farouk was actively supporting the somewhat xenophobic – certainly anti-Western – Tripolitanian National Congress, a situation which was causing great concern to the British. Cassels himself was given the job of running the election and obtaining a result that would be satisfactory to pro-British Libyans and to the British government, ‘using any means short of murder’. This last phrase was presumably said as a joke, but Cassels was not completely sure. I will say no more, other than that this story had a happy ending and Cassels acquitted himself without blame.

Richard Synge is to be commended for skilfully assembling the various elements of this story and he has done an excellent job of complementing the three primary sources with his own historical research. All in all, a very good read about a period of Libyan history that has, until now, been neglected.