Cairo
The agony and frustration of reporting from the Middle East
For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…
The cosmopolitan spirit of the Middle East vanished with the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
How two children vanished for a week en route from Africa to London
As we all know by now, the pandemic distorts time like a concertina. Life before March is a world that…
Mary Wesley’s passionate lifelong love affair
The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless…
A sensual Greek goddess
Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland…
Are Egypt’s obelisks more stunning even than the pyramids?
On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards…
BBC1’s The Night Manager verges on parody
The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’…
For Egypt, a bitter winter has followed the Arab spring
Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with…
An Egyptian comedy of errors
The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in…
Charles Moore’s Notes: Diane the Posh Goddess and Osborne’s mania
When I arrived at Cambridge in 1975, a nervous freshman, I remember walking with a friend past Newnham and being…
The revolution that went up in smoke
‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and…
Brothels, hashish, a poisonous scorpion, a cursed necklace: all excuses for macho antics in the Valley of the Kings
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…
A treasure-trove of grisly Arab tales may appeal more to an Isis fighter than your average British reader
The marvellous tales of the title are not just confined to the contents of this book, for the travels and…
Lord Rennard's hand-brushing is nothing. I'll tell you what true violation is
‘In my opinion,’ says Alistair Webster QC, author of the Liberal Democrats’ internal report into Lord Rennard’s droit de seigneur-style…
From Nasser to Mubarak — Egypt's modern pharaohs and their phoney myths
Jonathan Rugman is foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News.
High life:My first Egyptian coup
I remember it well. It was August 1952, and I was dining with my parents on the Palm Beach casino’s…
