Alexandria

"It tells us about the huge variety of life there. This is a brilliant and highly intellectual portrait of a city between 1900 and 1947. It shows you how modern and cultivated it was, introduces you to the Greek and Jewish families that lived there and ultimately tells you why people started to leave. Muhammad Ali is one of the central characters in my own book on the Levant. He is such an interesting character, who burst through boundaries of race and religion. He was born in Kavala in northeastern Greece, lived in Europe and then came to Egypt in 1801 as part of the Ottoman army, which re-occupied the country after a brief French occupation. There was a power vacuum and he seized his opportunity, installing a ruthless military and police state and gradually modernising the country. He created a modern navy based in Alexandria and built a palace there, where he regularly met consuls and traders from all over Europe and Asia. He created a modern health system and built roads and railways. Egypt was dragged out of chaos and backwardness and into the 19th century. His descendants, who ruled Egypt until 1952, always kept a palace in Alexandria. He needed a single port to link the economy of Egypt with Europe, and Alexandria was already used to the presence of foreign merchants and consuls. Yes, but in some ways Anthony Eden, Guy Mollet and David Ben-Gurion – the leaders of Britain, France and Israel who attacked Egypt in the Suez War of 1956 – were more to blame. Suez encouraged Nasser to pass various laws, for example penalising foreign owners of bank accounts in the country. So foreigners, as well as talented Egyptians, gradually left Alexandria and Egypt. This had seemed unthinkable in the early 1950s. When Nasser came to power in 1952 he was pro-western and pro-business. EM Forster fell in love with a tram conductor. He found the city sexually liberating in much the same way as travellers found Smyrna to be in the 18th century. Forster also wrote a brilliant history of Alexandria, which tries to be critical of the official British version. I reread The Alexandria Quartet and I didn’t like it as much as I did when I was a boy. Durrell found a lot of girlfriends in Alexandria, and made a lot of friends there. He found it inspiring for his poetry. But the novels are extremely lush and also quite anti-Egyptian. I prefer his letters from Alexandria to Henry Miller."