221x142mm, Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-914325-00-7
Price: £25.00
Available: April 2021
About the Author
Adel Darwish, is a British author, historian, political commentator and a veteran journalist, parliamentarian reporter & commentator based at the Press Gallery in the Palace of Westminster. Darwish has authored five books. 

Darwish has worked for most Fleet Street Papers as a foreign correspondent covering Africa and the Middle East since the Six-day war in 1967 through to the late 1980s. He knew and had meetings with most leaders of the region.

Although Darwish is on record for opposing giving journalists awards for doing their job, the Next Century Foundation for Peace awarded him, in 2008, the Cutting Edge Prize "for outstanding new ideas and contributions to peace and understanding via Journalism". In 2017 he accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Media Council" for his outstanding work as a journalist, covering many of the major political events of the last half a century and becoming a mentor for many aspiring young journalists.
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As a playwright and dramatist, Darwish has been involved in British theatre, with some of his plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival and at the Young Vic and several Fringe theatres in London during the 1970s. Most of his plays were adaptations of poems and short stories from Africa, especially from Egypt. A writer, broadcaster and commentator, Darwish continues to contribute, mostly live, to major national and international networks on a variety of subjects. His expertise on international affairs covers conflict, conflict resolution, water politics, the Middle East and Africa.

Alexandria Adieu
A Personal History: 1939-1960
By Adel Darwish

A twin narrative: one of the most insightful journalists of our time tells the enchanting story of this hauntingly beautiful city.
Adel Darwish has been a distinguished figure in the Press Gallery at the House of Commons through some of the most tumultuous political upheavals of the modern age. His reporting and analysis have informed literally millions, both across the Middle East region and internationally, and he is a regular figure across satellite news channels the world over. 

In Alexandria Adieu, he shares an eyewitness account of life in this uniquely cosmopolitan and ancient city between the Second World War and 1960. Over the course of this period, he witnessed the exodus of over 100,000 Alexandrians dispersed worldwide and the sad demise of many of the city's great institutions and traditions. This book tells that story and captures the lost charm, drawing not only on his own personal experiences in the city of his birth, but also on the rich historical background and the deep literary heritage.
From Alexandria Adieu:
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“...Sipping my Ice Cold in Alex,”  after the waiter had moved me inside the iconic Trianon Café to avoid offending Islamists, I gazed at Alexandria’s Eastern Harbour. For at least twelve years, this had been the busiest site in the entire ancient world. The quay, which once stood just yards from where I sat, was used mainly to load building materials into boats during the construction of surely the best known of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the 240-foot (73 metre)  high Lighthouse of Alexandria, completed in just twelve years starting around 280 BC.

The Eastern Harbour, as the name suggests, is the bay to the east of the Heptastadion - the causeway created on the orders of Alexander the Great by Dinocrates in 332 BC. Spanning 1.4km, it stretched an equivalent in length to seven Greek stadia and linked the island of Pharos with the mainland and the fishing village of Rhakotis. 

Pharos, as described by Homer in The Odyssey, was an “island in the surging sea...lying off Egypt". E. M. Forster, in his 1922 guidebook to the city, suggested that Prouti was “probably the original of Homer’s Proteus - Pharaoh of his Pharos.”

Homer’s island is now the peninsula of Ras-el Tin, Baherry and Anfoushy, also known as the Turkish quarter.  But my Alexandria - the city of  Cavafy and Durrell - has expanded way beyond the stones where  Hypatia stepped, giving her seminars, and the avenues where Cleopatra held her parades and hedonistic carnivals for Antony. My Alexandria was the city that Muhammed Ali resurrected. A unique city not quite Egypt and not quite Europe, but Alexandria,  with her very own mix of races; the distinctive Alexandrians.

“The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to Egypt, which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith which renounced worldly pleasure,” wrote Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet; “ The Egypt of rags and sores, of beauty and desperation. Alexandria was still Europe, the capital of Asiatic Europe, if such a thing could exist. She could never be like Cairo, where the whole life had an Egyptian cast, where everyone spoke Arabic; here [in Alexandria] French, Italian, Greek dominated the scene. The ambience, the social manner, everything was different, was cast in a European mould where somehow the camels, the palm trees and the cloaked natives existed only as a brilliantly coloured frieze, a backcloth to a life divided in its origins.”
Available Easter 2020.

​Order your copy direct from the publishers to receive a 20% discount.

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