Coming up trumps

There is an old Arab saying, ‘among the one-eyed close one eye’ (when in Rome…), a saw which seems particularly appropriate for Hugh Miles’s second book, set in and around the City of a Thousand Minarets. Novel or travelogue? — the reader sometimes wonders which, with a narrative too close-up and personal for the average travel (residence) book. But whatever the ratio of fact to fiction, this book has the feeling of a novel — and a good one at that. Jane Austen’s definition springs to mind: ‘The happiest delineation of the varieties of human nature, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, conveyed in the best-chosen language.’

Like the Arabists of the past — Burckhardt, Ali Bey, Sir Richard Burton, Lady Stanhope — Miles makes it his business to use language to arrive at the heart of the Islamic maze. Cairo’s earthiness provides a perfect backdrop: cosmopolitan, labyrinthine, protean, with no end of surprises.