Alexandria: A History and a Guide
1922
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.
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“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.””
— E. M. Forster
“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.””
— E. M. Forster
“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.””
— E. M. Forster
“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.””
— E. M. Forster
“This desire to govern a woman”
— E. M. Forster
“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.””
— E. M. Forster
“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.””
— E. M. Forster
“Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.””
— E. M. Forster
“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.””
— E. M. Forster
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95e"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Alexandria: A History and a Guide by E. M. Forster free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95e)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95e][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Alexandria: A History and a Guide by E. M. Forster free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95eCite this book
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Forster, E. M.. Alexandria: A History and a Guide. Lex, lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95e.Forster, E. M. (1922). Alexandria: A History and a Guide. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95eForster, E. M.. Alexandria: A History and a Guide. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/alexandria-a-history-and-a-guide-a5f4f3d7-fdf3-411b-87ac-f09a3540d95e.
