Cairo
The Middle East maelstrom
For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…
Nostalgia for the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Wild life
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…
Symbols of eternity
On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards…
Night moves
The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’…
A country in crisis
Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with…
Laughter and tears
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 writing on the wall
‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and…
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Big Cheese in MI6
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…
Wonders will never cease
The marvellous tales of the title are not just confined to the contents of this book, for the travels and…
Low life
‘In my opinion,’ says Alistair Webster QC, author of the Liberal Democrats’ internal report into Lord Rennard’s droit de seigneur-style…
Myths of the modern-day pharoahs
Jonathan Rugman is foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News.
High life
I remember it well. It was August 1952, and I was dining with my parents on the Palm Beach casino’s…
