Inventory of a Life Mislaid
MARINA WARNER
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 432 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

There must be something about a childhood in Egypt: Priscilla Napier, Penelope Lively, Christopher Hampton, and now Marina Warner (pictured). All these writers, whose recollected perceptions describe a vanished world of the Gezira Club, devoted Egyptian servants and dark apartments barricaded against the pitiless sun, are also chroniclers of the unease that goes with being a ruling class in another country.

Post-war Cairo for Esmond Warner held the possibility of domestic happiness with Ilia, whom he had met in Bari in 1944, and expanding the business of W.H. Smith in Egypt and beyond. Alas, as his daughter, Marina, documents in this exquisite memoir, it was not to be. The riots of 1952, which signified the end of a boom for foreigners and Egyptians alike, counted among their victims not only the visible symbols of British occupation like the Turf Club and Shepheard’s Hotel, but also foreign businesses including W.H. Smith. Esmond was felled, quite literally, by the disaster – Warner describes the “terrible memory” of him “falling to the ground howling”. The family returned to Europe.