From Nasser to Mubarak — Egypt’s modern pharaohs and their phoney myths

Reporting Egypt’s revolution three years ago, I had a sense of history not so much repeating itself as discharging sparks which seemed eerily familiar. Smoke was billowing into my hotel bedroom from the building next door, the headquarters of the Mubarak dictatorship which protestors had set alight; yet also visible from my balcony in Cairo that night were the flickering lights of Zamalek, the island of privilege in the River Nile where my father grew up before fleeing the flames of the Nasser regime on a flying boat in 1956.

At last comes a book which links the coups and revolutions witnessed by father and son. The Cambridge sociologist Hazem Kandil has produced a compelling history of Egypt’s 60-year power struggle. It is a tale of ruinous incompetence and staggering venality which consumes the country to this day. Unlike the modern-era pharaohs responsible, this book takes no prisoners. Beginning with Nasser, this is a withering denunciation of Egypt’s myth-makers and their phoney myths.