Clive Holes is Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the Arabic language and its dialects and has been teaching it since 1983. He lived and worked in the Gulf for ten years.
Praise for the first edition - 'Unlike most books on colloquial Arabic, this one covers the subject in a really comprehensive fashion. The author's experience in E[nglish] L[anguage] T[eaching] enables him to understand the needs of the learner who wishes to communicate effectively in Arabic -- two notable features of the book are the pacing of the material and the usefulness of the exercises... The dialogues are inventive, realistic and often humorous, and by the last unit the learner should be in a position to tackle ""real"" Gulf Arabic.' - from a review by Peter Emery, University of Bath, in the Journal of Semitic Studies, 29 (1984), p344-345.