Karl Sabbagh

Karl Sabbagh is a British writer, journalist, television producer, and convicted sex offender.^[1] His work is mainly non-fiction: he has written books about historical events and produced documentaries for both British and American broadcasters.

Karl Sabbagh
Born	Khalil Sabbagh 1942 Evesham, Worcestershire, England, UK
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Writer, journalist, producer
Spouse	Sue Heber Percy
Children	4

Biography

Karl Sabbagh was born in Evesham, Worcestershire, England in the March quarter of 1942.^[2] His father was the Palestinian Christian broadcaster Isa Sabbagh [ar], at the time working for the BBC Arabic Service;^[3] his mother, born Pamela Graydon, was English, of American and Irish parentage. His parents divorced soon after he was born and his father later lived in the United States, but Karl (originally named Khalil after his grandfather) remained in England with his mother.

Sabbagh was educated at Clapham College and King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in natural sciences and about which he wrote A Book of King's: Views of a Cambridge College in 2010.^[4][5] He was the producer of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, ‘The natural history of a sunbeam’, by George Porter, in 1976 and ‘The planets’, by Carl Sagan, in 1977.^[6]

Sabbagh's book Palestine (2006) interweaves a history of Palestine from the 18th century with an account of his paternal family, who were prominent Christian members of Palestinian society in Galilee throughout that period, settled in the town of Safad from at least the beginning of the 19th century. The book includes a critical account of the Zionist settlement and eventual takeover of Palestine in the first half of the 20th century.

Personal life

He is married to Sue Heber Percy and they have four children.^[7][8][2]

In September 2019 Sabbagh was jailed for 45 months and put on the sex-offenders register for life after being convicted of grooming a 14-year-old girl.^[1]

Bibliography

• The Living Body (1984; with Christiaan Barnard).
• Skyscraper: The Making of a Building (1989) (the story of the building of One Worldwide Plaza)
• Magic or Medicine?: An Investigation of Healing & Healers (1993; with Rob Buckman) (an investigation of alternative medicine)
• Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777 (1996)
• A Rum Affair: A True Story Of Botanical Fraud (1999) (about the botanical fraud perpetrated by John William Heslop-Harrison)
• Power into Art (2000) (the story of the redevelopment of Bankside power station as Tate Modern)
• Dr. Riemann's Zeros: The Search for the $1 Million Solution to the Greatest Problem in Mathematics (2002); The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, 1st American edition (2003)^[9] (about the Riemann Hypothesis)
• Palestine: A Personal History (2006)
• Your Case is Hopeless: Bracing Advice From the Boy's Own Paper (2007)
• Remembering our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us (2009)
• The Hair of the Dog and Other Scientific Surprises (2009)
• A Book of King's: Views of a Cambridge College (2010)
• The Trials of Lady Jane Douglas (2014)
• Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public (2018) ISBN 9781911072362

See also

• Palestinian Christians