WAS King Hussein of Jordan a great man who, by dint of his remarkable personality, courage and far-sighted perseverance, played a critical part in nudging the Israelis and the Palestinians at least halfway towards the settlement they may one day reach? Or was he as much lucky as brave (he was known a little patronisingly in the region as the “PLK”—“plucky little king”)? Was he a man who vacillated from crisis to crisis, buffeted by the ever-changing winds of global and regional politics but surviving against the odds by duplicitously playing off all sides against each other and taking bids from whoever seemed to have the highest cards at the time—Russians and Americans, Arabs and Jews, Baathists and monarchists—while seeking merely to stay on his rickety and often irrelevant throne?

Avi Shlaim, a Baghdad-born, Israeli-bred historian now at Oxford University, argues persuasively that the first, nobler version is the correct one. Particularly with regard to foreign policy, his weighty tome is the most authoritative biography of the king, who died in 1999 at the age of 63.

No one doubts that Hussein was courageous, certainly in physical terms, often morally too. He was only 16 when his grandfather, King Abdullah, was shot at point blank range by a Palestinian nationalist a few yards from the young prince. After the brief reign of his unstable father, Talal, Hussein became king at 17 and ruled as an absolute monarch, with the odd trapping of democracy, until his death from cancer nearly 46 years later. He survived numerous plots to kill or oust him. At times he was vilified by just about every government in the region, and by quite a few farther afield. Several of his prime ministers were assassinated. The murder in 1958 of his cousin Faisal, king of Iraq, who was six months older than he was, seemed to presage the inevitable demise of the House of Hashem elsewhere.

Early on during his reign, the consensus was that Jordan, a British confection that had emerged like other nearby Arab states from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire after the first world war, was unlikely to survive; in 1957, John Foster Dulles, America's then secretary of state, said it had “no justification as a state”, though he grudgingly added that that “did not mean that now is the time to eliminate it”.

In the course of Hussein's rule various Syrian, Iraqi, Saudi and Israeli regimes reckoned that Jordan could and should have been gobbled up, merged or at least partitioned. An Israeli intelligence report in 1980 described the king as “a man trapped on a bridge burning at both ends, with crocodiles in the river beneath him”.

Trying to solve the conundrum of Israel and Palestine was by far the biggest burden of his years on the throne. He realised much earlier than his fellow Arab rulers that, as Mr Shlaim puts it, “Israel was there to stay.” But Hussein took longer to accept that only a full-blooded Palestinian state on Jordan's West Bank, captured by Israel in the war of 1967, would satisfy the Palestinians, who were (and are) a majority of Jordan's inhabitants. For a long time he regarded the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which he ferociously suppressed in what amounted to a civil war when it tried to overthrow him in 1970, as a greater threat than Israel.

Mr Shlaim spells out in hitherto unpublished detail the history of secret dealings between the king and the Israelis, from 1963 until 1994, when he signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state. Hussein had at least 55 secret meetings (all listed) with leading Israelis, including at least seven prime and foreign ministers. Did these closet encounters advance the peace process, still stumbling along today without getting close to fruition? Mr Shlaim suggests that they did—and that the blame for their not getting further rests largely with the Israelis and their American backers.

The author has had unrivalled access to prime sources, especially Jordanian ones, including a candid interview with the king himself and with an array of his advisers and royal relations, as well as with a raft of senior Israeli intelligence people. The result is a pot of delectable nuggets. For instance, he reveals that a Jordanian debriefing of a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, who defected to Jordan in the 1990s, showed that the Iraqi leader may well have been deterred from launching missiles with chemical warheads at Israel only because the Israelis told the Jordanians via a secret channel that there would be massive—by implication nuclear—retaliation by Israel.

Mr Shlaim concedes that the king was occasionally naive and impulsive, and could put too much store on personality and too little on ideology. On this score, his most grievous misjudgments were briefly to prefer the right-wing Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu, whom he seemed to back (perhaps even tipping the scales) against Shimon Peres, whom he did not trust, in the Israeli election of 1996; and the closeness of his friendship with Saddam Hussein, at any rate throughout the 1980s and in the run-up to the first Gulf war, when the king refused to join the coalition against the Iraqi leader. Mr Shlaim also argues that the Jordanian monarch should have avoided getting sucked into the war of 1967 against Israel.

Nor does he shrink from enumerating the king's other faults. Hussein could be ruthless—and probably had to be. When, in 1956, he dismissed John Bagot Glubb, who served the king after 26 years as commander of the Arab Legion, the British soldier was given less than a day to leave the country. Most cruel—but arguably astute—was the sacking of his brother, Prince Hassan, as crown prince, who had served him with complete loyalty for 34 years, just 12 days before the king died.

Hussein was a poor economic manager, letting corruption flourish far too widely at the top level; indeed, he himself used the treasury as something of a private source of patronage and sometimes of high living. The kingdom's survival depended invariably on its being bankrolled by outside powers—at first the British, then the Americans, sometimes (for too long) Iraq, occasionally the Saudis. And these subsidies—particularly the CIA's—were sometimes handed straight to the king.

On the whole, however, given the need for a rugged element of realpolitik and toughness in order to survive, he emerges from under Mr Shlaim's microscope as honest, fundamentally decent and, in a region noted for its brutality and treachery, notably merciful and kind. In his personal dealings, most strikingly with the Israelis, he was especially gracious. Above all, alongside his determination to sustain the House of Hashem, he was totally wedded to the cause of peace in the Middle East. That he did not fully achieve it, despite his peace treaty with Israel, was not his fault; indeed, without his relentless diplomacy (conducted often along those secret channels), the region might be even bloodier than it is already.