In most cities of the Middle East and North Africa, you’ll see displayed on stalls and in shop windows, artful texts, usually from the Qu’ran, of words distilled into pictures – of horses, or ships or praying men, their shapes picked out in the fine shading of word used as image. They can be … More A Theory of Everything

  In the late 1970s, when I first lived in Cairo, I had lunch most Fridays at the Turf Club. Not of course the original Turf Club, burnt down in the riots of 1952 (a club which “would not have looked out of place in St James’s”), but its nominal successor, which was in a … More ‘A lecherous old Wog on the outside’