Diana Darke is a Middle East cultural expert with special focus on Syria. A graduate in Arabic from Oxford University, she has spent over 30 years specialising in the Middle East and Turkey, working for both government and commercial sectors. She is the author of several books on Middle East society, including My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis (2016) and The Merchant of Syria (2018), a socio-economic history. Her latest book "Stealing from the Saracens" will be published in August 2020 by Hurst Publishers.