Algerian Notebook

• This is surely a mistake, I thought, stooping to kiss the hand of Algeria’s minister of culture. Madame la Ministre Toumi Khalida is throwing a party to mark the start of Algeria’s annual book fair, the Salon International du Livre. This year’s line-up includes a contingent of South Africans led by Breyten Breytenbach, the dashing poet and former revolutionary, now resident mostly in Paris. My inclusion is a complete mystery, given the event’s broadly anti-imperialist tenor. Clearly, Algerians do not read The Spectator. But one doesn’t turn down a busman’s, so here I am, helping myself to a drink off a passing tray. The drink is green, sickly sweet and dismayingly bereft of crusader intoxicants, but there are compensations — nearly everyone here is smoking. Indoors. In the heart of one of President Bouteflika’s palatial residences. This one is an ice-white concrete structure, with lifts sliding up and down the walls of its cavernous inner atrium.