Embargo

Embargo is both an illuminating account of the 1973 oil crisis and an extraordinary echo of the current one. Philip Delves Broughton offers a sobering reminder of the misunderstandings that plague geopolitics to this day. Remarkably resonant.

LYSE DOUCET, author of The Finest Hotel in Kabul

A masterpiece: Delves Broughton is the most evocative non-fiction writer of our time. Here is the hawk-eyed King Faisal, seated at dinner with a hooded falcon, mimicking the bird's piercing screech as he throws it meat from his table. There is Ibn Saud, crossing the Great Bitter Lake in a tent pitched on the deck of an American destroyer, sheep penned at the stern. And in Washington, Henry Kissinger, soothing and schmoozing Liza Minnelli an hour before Faisal turns off the oil. Sand, gold and treachery — this book made me feel a century turn.

SEBASTIAN MALLABY, author of The Man Who Knew

The 1973 Arab oil embargo was a profound turning point in the modern age – the beginning of a wholesale reordering of the world's geopolitical chessboard – and it has at last found its worthy chronicler. Through prodigious research and a novelist's eye for the intriguing detail, Broughton takes his reader into the conference rooms and desert tents where strategies were devised and deals cut to produce the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. Readers will gain a fascinating education into how the global oil industry really works - and have a rollicking good time in the process.

SCOTT ANDERSON, author of King of Kings

Gripping and insightful, Embargo is a must-read to understand not just the 1973 oil crisis, but every energy shock that has followed since – including the 2026 US-Iran war for the control of the Strait of Hormuz.

JAVIER BLAS, co-author of The World for Sale

Embargo is the best book on oil politics I’ve read. It’s totally absorbing.

JAMES BARR, author of A Line in the Sane

Philip Delves Broughton has turned the birth of the modern petro-state into a thriller - specific, cinematic, and completely impossible to put down. Embargo is the book that explains how the world we live in was actually made.

BRADLEY HOPE, co-author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood & Oil

It takes a very clever author to deliver both a ripping yarn and a big ideas book. In this page turning history of the 1970s OPEC embargo, Philip Delves Broughton does both. Connecting the dots between the discovery of oil, the origins of Israel, Western corporate greed and the ongoing tension between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, he shows us why the Middle East remains the mother of all geostrategic chokepoints.

RANA FOROOHAR, Financial Times columnist and author of Sea Change

Marvellous. I gobbled this book up and learned something new on nearly every page. Even if we weren't once again wrestling with oil crises, I would have enthusiastically recommended Embargo. Since we are, this is essential reading.

ED CONWAY, author of Material World