Where is Malcolm Kerr when we really need him? We have asked this question in my family many times during the past 25 years of intifadas, suicide bombings, checkpoints, insistent terror and increasing complication in the Middle East. The question is always followed by a sigh because Malcolm Kerr, a brilliant scholar of Middle East politics, was a famous casualty of those complications, gunned down in January 1984 as he stepped out of a lift on the way to his office at the American University of Beirut. Kerr, a neighbour and family friend for 20 years, had been president of...