Summary: Cairo. The facts say one thing: the biggest city in Africa and the Middle East and now so chaotic and polluted that most visitors to Egypt prefer to avoid it. This same city also speaks to us of history and humanity - Moses and Jesus, Arab poets and Napoleon's scholars who were here beside the Nile. It speaks of brilliance, beauty and power, of Europeans looking on in amazement at a Cairo that was the trading partner of Venice and of such importance that the Arabian Nights narrator called it the Mother of the World. More recently, through writers such as Nobel prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz and Alaa Al-Aswany, it has spoken of humour amid hardships, of both compassion and corruption. Having seen Cairo shift and grow over the past twenty-five years, former resident Anthony Sattin invites you to examine the streets, the stories and the history of Cairo in an attempt to reconcile the myths with the facts. Writer and broadcaster who has spent much of his adult life travelling in and writing about the Middle East and North Africa. He fell in love in Cairo in the 1980s and has been a regular visitor ever since. His books include the highly-acclaimed The Pharaoh's Shadow, an account of his search for surviving ancient culture in Egypt, and The Gates of Africa, the story of the 18th century search for Timbuktu. His forthcoming book, A Winter on the Nile, tells of the journey Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert made in Egypt in 1849-50.
