Alexandria: A History and a Guide

E. M. Forster arrived in Alexandria in 1915, working for the Red Cross during the First World War, and fell under the city's spell. A century later, his slender volume remains the finest book ever written about this phantom metropolis - a place that was once the greatest city on earth and by 1922 had become something more melancholy: a layered palimpsest of empires, its ancient glories buried beneath modern decay. Forster moves fluidly between history and present tense, between Ptolemaic grandeur and the faded grandeur of Khedivial Alexandria, between scholarly research and the wry observations of a traveler wandering the streets. He writes of Cleopatra's Alexandria with the same affectionate precision as he brings to describing a particular coffee house or the particular quality of Mediterranean light on the Corniche. The guide section that follows the history is no mere tourist appendix - it is Forster at his most personal, directing readers toward what matters and gently away from what doesn't. The result is a book that functions both as an introduction to one of history's most seductive cities and as a meditation on how we inhabit and lose the places we love.