![]() ![]() ![]() I added a copy to my pile of non-fiction books and immediately felt guilty. Now, however, I was seduced by the image on the book’s front cover, a water-colour of a neo-Palladian villa so common to Alexandria’s corniche and narrow byways. Forster on Viagra), but I had been too disciplined to be distracted by a short story, let alone a novel sequence that weighs in at 884 pages. Many of my Egyptian friends had recommended it (while simultaneously dismissing it as E. In 2001 I took leave to write my own book.īefore my departure, I paid one final visit to the American University’s bookshop in Cairo and there I came across a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. By the end of my three-year stint, I had accumulated a working library of stolid non-fiction accounts of the Middle East, from the days of the Caliphate to the Second Intifada. I was a machine in perpetual motion the more I read, the more I needed to know. I consumed their separate narratives, cross-referencing one against the other and triangulating each for bias. I loaded up on the standard books on the region by all the standard experts: Hitti, Hourani, Nutting, Glubb, Fromkin, Shlaim, Lewis. ![]() I attacked my new assignment as a Middle East correspondent with the alacrity of a baying hound running down a wanted man. ![]()
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