“I suddenly wanted to vomit,” recalls Rania al-Baz, remembering the sensation of not recognising herself.
“I had been a pretty woman,” she says, “now I was a monster.”
Her husband had beaten her to a pulp in a fit of rage, smashing her head repeatedly against the marble floor of their home. Although she had defied doctors’ expectations by living to tell her tale, her days as a presenter on Saudi Arabian breakfast television were over.
Instead she has emerged as a champion for battered Saudi women and in between numerous operations on her skull has written a memoir. Her efforts to publicise it in Britain in the coming weeks will throw the spotlight on the rampant abuse of Saudi women by men who, like