The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet travelled across its vast sand deserts and arid highlands in 1966–8, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan's motives may have been pure – to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt – but Ian Skeet's portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.